The yellowed clippings in the newspaper's Washington Boulevard file, most more than a half-century old, show how long the city has dithered in overcoming the dangers on the flood-prone road where four people died in the Aug. 19 downpour.

September 1953: "Flood Warning Lights Urged For Washington Boulevard.''

October 1955: "GOP Candidate Rips [Mayor David L.] Lawrence on Floods; [William P.] Young Charges Mayor 'Dilly-Dallying' With Lives on Washington Boulevard.''

February 1960: "Big Flood Job Planned By City; $132,000 Sewer in Boulevard Area.''

By the summer of 1960, Mayor Joseph Barr's administration was saying the problem of flooding on the lower end of the boulevard was "largely corrected.'' A 48-inch sewer on the boulevard from Frankstown Avenue down the hill to the Lincoln Avenue extension, costing only $75,000, and the opening of Negley Run Boulevard in 1955, was said to be enough.

This was nine years after a motorist had drowned in her car during a 1951 downpour on the boulevard. By 1960, the $800,000 plan to lift the lower end of the roadway was shelved because it "lacked urgency.''

Does anyone think that now?

Late 19th-century maps show that a stream once ran through that valley. Negley's Run, fed by water tumbling from the flanking hills, flowed north along the western side of what was then called River Road and emptied into the Allegheny River.

Civil engineers vanquished that natural system more than 100 years ago. Sometime around the turn of the century, the stream was encased in a massive pipe and buried underground. By 1909, a Pennsylvania Commissioner of Health report referred to 11-foot brick sewer that emptied the Negley Run basin into the river. A second pipe was added on the road's eastern side in 1911.

These pipes, though 8.5 and 9 feet in diameter, can't handle severe storms. The boulevard becomes a lagoon with Allegheny River Boulevard acting as a northern dam. The pipes fill; the water doesn't have anywhere to go.

On Thursday, I wrote of Councilman Patrick Dowd's idea of restoring the natural stream and breaking that dam. A Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority board member, Mr. Dowd suggests making Allegheny River Boulevard an overpass so the stream can pass beneath it before tumbling into the river.

John Schombert, director of 3 Rivers Wet Weather, likes that idea. Send the runoff from the boulevard's catch basins directly to what may be a dry creek bed for much of the year, not to pipes that must serve a 3,000-acre area.

"What you're doing is giving that bathtub down there its own drain,'' Mr. Schombert said. "It's not complex engineering. There's a lot of complex engineering that has to be done in this whole system -- and this isn't it.

"That's not to say it's not expensive.''

Much of Greater Pittsburgh is dealing with ancient piping systems, carrying both rainwater and sewage, that can overflow after just a little rain. Most of what's piped to the Allegheny County Sanitary Authority treatment plant on any given day isn't sewage but rainwater that arrives in the same pipes. When those pipes are overtaxed, they divert untreated sewage directly into the rivers.

The federal government has ordered a regional overhaul. Fixing the problems on Washington Boulevard would be only one part of a broad, multibillion-dollar task that could take generations to complete. But why not start where high-pressure water can blow 50-pound manhole covers skyward and contribute to catastrophe?

I've often thought that Pittsburgh is luckier than the Sun Belt. Some of those cities are going dry. Our problem is too much water getting into the wrong places, which seems an easier problem to manage -- most of the time.

Then we get a flash flood and it becomes clear we're not managing our water. A crumbling, ill-designed system is kept out of sight and out of mind. When the all-too predictable catastrophe occurs, we look back to the precedents that were more than fair warning. Then we scramble to do something about it right up until the moment we don't.

There might be a better idea than restoring what nature had in mind for that valley, but there's no idea worse than doing nothing.