Forecasts of heavy rain in parts of the state on Friday put Japan Street residents on edge again fearing their properties would be flooded for a third time in just over a month.
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But the city council says there are no quick fixes for the drainage problems that have plagued the area and it would need a "considerable sum of money" spent on them
The downpour on January 2 turned Paul Harris' back yard into a lake, and the water was almost a metre high in his garage.
The brand new gazebo and outdoor furniture he had just purchased was ruined, and many of his belongings in the garage were lost including photos.
"It's 40 years of memories gone," he said. "Everyone's lost so much. It's not just me. We're all on edge."
"The fridge came out and started to float. It was unbelievable. A foot wave was coming off my letterbox.
"My car floated around the roundabout coming into my street."
Last Friday Mr Harris was out of town when the street flooded again, but he called the SES who came and sandbagged the garage as floodwaters lapped outside again. He has now put all his belongings up on tables in case it happens again.
"Every time it rains, everyone's on edge. There's anxiety. People aren't coping. It's starting to affect people's mental health," he said.
"What gets me is that we've been nominated for best regional town to live in yet we're three blocks from the main street and we have to live in fear all the time of a flood."
Mr Harris said he was speaking out about the plight of residents on the street because everyone had been hit hard by the floods.
"I'm a voice for the street because everyone is in the same boat, literally," he said.
"It's not a laugh after six days of cleaning up after every bit of garbage from the council's drains which ends up in your back yard.
"The stink. You should have smelt it. It was shocking. It was like a sewerage pit."
Mr Harris said he called the council after the first flood to see if they could do an extra rubbish collection but was told to take it to the tip.
He said he was disappointed he got no help from council.
"They're the cause of it for not upgrading the stormwater in flood zone areas," he said.
In the early 1990s, the council purchased three homes in the street because the flooding issue was so bad no one would live there, Mr Harris said.
Funds have been set aside in this year's council budget for a feasibility study for mitigation work at Albert Park, but it would only partially alleviate the problem.
The council's new infrastructure director David Leahy said there was no quick fix to the problems without spending a considerable sum of money.
"There's a hundred layers of investigation that needs to be done to work out what to do to fix it. You're never going to completely fix it because of the terrain," he said.
"I know that there is a tunnel there that has varying degrees of serviceability and that's going to have to play part of the rectifications as well.
"When you live in the real low parts of the city there's always going to be the risk of some degree of ... risk of floodwaters or heavy storm events not being able to get away.
Mr Leahy said the council was looking at the renewal of stormwater assets right across the city.
"It's an area that's underfunded and it's underground so a lot of people don't think it warrants the expenditure but as the city increases and the paved area increases, so does the overland flows. We're trying to play catch up on a system that is probably a little bit dated," he said.
Mr Leahy said he felt for the residents. "There were a lot of people that had water in their properties. There's no quick fix to it without spending a considerable sum of money," he said.
He said the city's stormwater system could cope with constant rain, but there would be very few systems in the state that could cope with rain events with the level of intensity the city had experienced last month.
Mr Leahy said with the terrain rising steeply in both directions on Japan Street, there was no quick fix without impacting someone else. He said the council had to be mindful of the impact any works would have downstream.
"There needs to be a major investment in order to rectify it," he said.
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