BATON ROUGE - Just two weeks after a hurricane ripped through southwest Louisiana, East Baton Rouge and surrounding parishes are preparing yet again.

“Crews have been out since Hurricane Ida removing trees out of city-parish right of ways, out of canals and ditches that we’re aware of. We’ve been pulling trees, we had crews out all weekend pulling trees, and we will continue to do that," said Kelvin Hill, Assistant Administrative Officer for the EBR City-Parish government.

For the last six to eight weeks, the parish has been working on specific drainage efforts: cleaning out storm drains and pipes.

“We’ve removed a little over 3.6 million pounds of debris from our stormwater system, we’ve done over 3200 structures that we’ve cleaned out across city-parish. I think that cleaning process has gone well, which will allow our system to drain as good as it’s designed to drain," Hill said.

The cleanup process is still ongoing ahead of Hurricane Nicholas, and time is ticking before the storm brings in a projected one to six inches of rainfall to the area. Hill said residents of Baton Rouge should refrain from stacking debris in ditches.

"Please don’t do that. You can put it on the side of the ditch, but don’t put it in the ditch because we still want things to drain. Be sure the ditches are clear, be sure the drains are clear and be sure you don’t have any loose debris that can get washed into storm drains.”

Sandbag locations are set up throughout the parish in case flooding is a concern.