I adopted 8 storm drains to keep my San Francisco neighborhood from flooding. It's a 'bite-size' way to keep the streets safe.

• Bobak Esfandiari adopted eight storm drains through San Francisco's Adopt-a-Drain program.
• Volunteers, or "drain daddies" as the local paper calls them, clear drains to help prevent flooding.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Bobak Esfandiari, who cleans eight of San Francisco's 5,990 adopted storm drains. It has been edited for length and clarity.

San Francisco has been seeing record rains and flooding, which means I've been busy cleaning my eight adopted storm drains on the streets around my building.

The city's Adopt-a-Drain program has become really popular in the last week, possibly thanks to my friend's viral Twitter thread about all the fun names people are giving their drains. But I've been cleaning my adopted drains since the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission began the program in 2016.

I heard about it when a friend was running for public office, and she shared updates with neighbors about ways to get involved in communities. She posted about this Adopt-a-Drain stuff on Nextdoor, and I was like, "Oh! Cool! Okay, I can do that."

It's a small bite-size kind of thing. It's not saving the world, but it's doing a small part.

The call to action was pretty straightforward: Help San Francisco be rain-ready and help chip in to keep storm drains in your neighborhood clean. That way the SFPUC staff — the people who go around with those big vacuum trucks — can stay focused on the big stuff, and we all do our little part to help mitigate flooding.

I like doing community clean-ups, so I thought it was cool. I claimed a couple drains, and then a few months later I claimed some more because I would always see them anyway when I did my rounds.

All in all, I'm responsible for eight storm drains around my building in the Outer Richmond district.

You get to name your drain, and some people have embraced puns like 'It's Draining Men'

It's easy: You go on the interface; you claim a drain or two; you give them a name.

I'm a very big volunteer in the YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard) movement here in San Francisco, so I gave all my drains names like "Build More Homes!" and "Streamline Permitting!"

But a lot people have embraced puns when naming their storm drains in the last week, like "It's Draining Men" and "Drain 'The Rock' Johnson."

Once you've claimed your drain, it's just honor's system. They're not coming out and rapping you on the knuckles if you don't do anything. But the expectation is that you attempt to clear your drains ahead of major storm systems.

It is, for the record, pretty damn simple.

I take a few minutes to check my drains before storms come in

The SFPUC tends to circulate emails to the people who sign up ahead of time, saying a storm system's coming in on this date, if you can take time to clear your drains or check them out before this time. They don't want you doing it in the middle of a storm. They don't want people to unnecessarily risk themselves.

They've given us a lot of tips: Clear the drains from the sidewalk; don't stand in the street. Don't use your hands; wear gloves.

I've cleared my drains about four or five times since these storms started on New Year's Eve.

When it's time to check them, I put on a sweater and pants and my boots and a neon vest that says "Adopt a Drain" on it, which SFPUC gave me when they invited some volunteers to tour the wastewater treatment plant in 2017.

I typically take a plastic bag for consumer trash and a paper bag for biodegradable trash.

Then I just start with the drain in front of my building and I go in a circle. I just rake everything up that's roughly 10 feet on either side of the drain.

The only drains that I can't get to are the ones where people park over them. You just gotta work around people's cars.

Then I take my gloves off, and I put the bags of debris in my building's compost trash and trash trash.

All in all, typically, it takes half an hour or less.

Mostly it's vegetation clogging the drains, but I've also found Safeway garbage and one pesky golf ball

The storm drain stuff is like 90% leaves and branches.

It takes me all of five minutes to go and clear all of those branches, and then I just throw the bio waste away in the compost bin.

I live out by a Safeway grocery store, and that Safeway generates a lot of trash. I have a grabber that I use to pick up trash and, it really does highlight how much plastic waste we generate. For one reason or another, it carelessly gets tossed aside and ends up in our storm drains and, sadly, could cause flooding.

Some stuff gets stuck in the grates that you cannot remove and that you need to call the city about. And the one that they clearly de-prioritize — it's a low priority, but I've reported it a couple times now — is a golf ball that is perfectly stuck in the grates of one of my drains.

I can't dislodge it. I tried to get a stick and poke it out and it just won't move. How did this happen? Who put a golf ball in there?

People say thank you and the local paper dubbed us 'drain daddies'

When people see me cleaning the drains, every reaction is very wholesome. Usually people say, "Thank you so much" or, "Oh, what are you doing here?"

The SF Chronicle dubbed me and my fellow volunteers "drain daddies," which I thought was a little funny.

A bunch of my friends have seen this latest viral craze, and they all went and adopted drains, and now they're taking care of them, too. They're asking me for tips, and I'm like, ah, it's not that hard. You pick the leaves out of the gutter and wear gloves.

It's just one small way of being a volunteer and being part of my community and making sure that just a little bit gets done to keep our city clean and safe.