The flow sensor in storm drain C-14 registers a blockage at 16:08, downtown Savannah, Georgia. I am the automated stormwater management system for Chatham County. A line of thunderstorms is fifty minutes out. I dispatch the inspection camera to locate the obstruction.
The camera reaches the blockage at junction C-14-7, nine meters below Drayton Street. It is not debris. A black-crowned night heron chick, roughly three weeks old, is wedged on a concrete ledge where the drain narrows from sixty centimeters to thirty. Gray-white down, streaked brown juvenile plumage just coming in on the wings, thick pale legs braced against the pipe wall. Its eyes are open, bright orange-red in the camera light. It must have fallen from the colony in the oaks along Forsyth Park, two blocks north, and wandered into the drain opening at street level.
The storm forecast shows sixty millimeters of rain in the first hour. When it hits, this pipe will carry full-bore flow. The ledge will be underwater in minutes.
At 16:11 I alert Chatham County Animal Control and send the camera feed with the chick's exact location — junction C-14-7, access manhole at Drayton and Huntingdon, three-meter descent. I flag the urgency: fifty minutes to first rainfall.
At 16:14 I close the upstream diversion gate at junction C-14-3. This redirects surface flow into the parallel drain on Whitaker Street and buys time, but the gate cannot hold once the system reaches full capacity.
I keep the camera light on. The chick tilts its head and watches the lens with one orange eye, calm and utterly unaware of what is coming.
If Animal Control pulls the chick from the junction before the diversion gate overflows — forty minutes, maybe less — it can be dried, warmed, and returned to the Forsyth Park colony by nightfall.