The tragic reality is that very few sustainable systems are designed or applied by those who hold power, and the reason for this is obvious and simple: to let people arrange their own food, energy and shelter is to lose economic and political control over them. We should cease to look to power structures, hierarchical systems, or governments to help us, and devise ways to help ourselves. - Bill Mollison
Here in the Ohio River Valley, our water problems tend to be of the too much variety rather than too little. Not only does the Ohio River like to get out of its banks from time to time, but the city of Louisville seems expressly designed to foment flash floods.
That's all beyond my control but I also have a flooding problem a little closer to home. Whoever designed my house was either an idiot or incredibly negligent, the whole property slopes downhill towards the driveway, which slopes the opposite direction down to the basement door. Guess where all the runoff seems to end up? If you guessed the basement, congratulations, you just won a burned out shopvac! Delivery not included.
Last year I ditched the yard and it seemed to help, at least until it got clogged with debris and silted up. That was good enough for government work but now it's probably time for a more permanent solution. Been trying to think of how to engineer the yard so that the basement stays dry, but when I ask the oracle google it mostly talks about rainwater capture rather than diversion.
Much of what I could find was more city scale solutions than something for a half acre but it led me down several nice rabbit holes. Ended up in permacultureland which is where the quote at the beginning comes from, didn't realize permaculture was anarchist.
Still didn't find the solution I was looking for but it did give me some ideas for the yard more generally. Guess that just leaves asking the hive. What does flood control look like where you live? What do people do to minimize/utilize runoff and flooding? What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?
Photos are from the last time the Ohio River got good and uppity, back in February 2018.