Thanks to an investment of millions of dollars and thousands of hours of work, those problems are greatly reduced.

“We haven’t put out a bypass pump in quite some time,” City Manager David Fierke said Monday.

There is still plenty of work to do, however, to manage storm water in the city.

In a report presented to the City Council Monday, consulting engineers identified $98.7 million worth of work that’s needed on the city’s storm sewers.

Patrick Hartman, an engineer with JEO Consulting Group, a firm with offices in Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska, acknowledged that the figure is “kind of a prohibitive number.”

And when asked by Mayor Matt Bemrich if the figure included the cost of rebuilding the roads that are over the storm sewers, Hartman replied that it did not.

American cities have two kinds of sewers. Sanitary sewers collect all the waste water that goes down drains and toilets and sends it to a treatment plant, where it undergoes a process to clean it up before it is discharged into a body of water.

Storm sewers collect rain water and channel it into streams or other bodies of water. Storm water is not treated.

Fort Dodge has 812,000 feet of storm sewers, according to the engineers’ report.

Those sewers range in diameter from eight inches to 84 inches. And while that may sound impressive, many of the sewers are actually too small, according to Curt Kampman, another engineer with JEO Consulting Group.

He said a minimum of 15 inches in diameter is the current standard.

The report identifies 51 storm sewer improvement projects.

Kampman said that list will be refined to prioritize six projects before a final report is submitted.

The council took no action on storm sewers Monday.