Revisiting the flood
This is part one of a three part series looking at what local entities have accomplished since the Memorial Weekend Floods of 2015 along with what is still left to be done three years later. Part one will look at what Hays County has accomplished, while parts two and three will look at the city of Wimberley and local non-profits that were focused on flood recovery.
It was three years ago this week, on a Memorial Day weekend, when catastrophic and deadly flooding hit Hays County. In Wimberley, the Blanco River — which in many places is just a shallow riverbed only inches deep — rose 12 feet in 30 minutes, according to the National Weather Service, eventually cresting at an estimated 44.9 feet. The lives of 12 people were lost in the floods, some of which have not been found to this day.
All in all, 1,938 households in Hays County were affected by the floodwaters, according to Hays County Emergency Management Director Kharley Smith. The waters swept away several bridges in the county.
A lot has changed since that weekend.
“We’ve been working hard,” Hays County Commissioner Lon Shell said.
Flood Warning System
The county has worked on a new emergency response plan, which includes a heavy investment into flood monitoring and warning.
Hays County used a grant from the Texas Water Development Board to develop a new flood warning system – a system of flood gauges and sensors to provide real-time flooding conditions to the public and emergency responders.
“We’ve done a lot of work as far as early warning, flood gauges, river monitoring and flow monitoring,” Shell said. “We’ve really emboldened the number of gauges and how the system takes that information in. We took modeling to try and predict future flooding based on rainfall in certain areas of the basin.”
The county has several projects and studies pending, Smith said, including inundation studies and the construction of more detention basins though most detention projects are in the San Marcos area.
“We will be looking to utilize Hazard Mitigation grant funding and/or CBDG (Community Development Block Grant) funding to bring these projects to completion,” Smith said.
Another future project mentioned was a “robust high water alarm” system on low water crossings.
Emergency
Communications
Some of the most important work is still underway.
“We looked at how we responded are everything from our emergency communication center,” Shell said. “When that flood happened, our dispatch went down because of our location in San Marcos. We were able to work with the cities of Kyle and San Marcos. Those lessons learned from that have gone into our planning for the new center from how it is hardened, to redundancies and how we work with other agencies. We have used those lessons from the flood and those are being implemented as we plan.”
The 2016 county bonds will pay for the new, stateof-the-art emergency communication center to prevent the communications issues that occurred during the flood for first responders.
“Our new emergency communications center is a big part of that and how we will operate with other people in the same room and new technologies,” Shell said. “How we plan for them with all of our partners whether it be the city of Wimberley, Kyle, San Marcos, the state or GBRA. Those are things that we are still working on.”
Capital
Improvements
From a capital improvements standpoint, the county has been rebuilding roads and bridges, the largest of which was the bridge on Fischer Store Road. A temporary bridge was installed on Post Road with a permanent bridge being constructed in 2017. At least seven other low water crossings needed significant work. In the Wimberley Valley, the county repaired the crossings on County Road 1492, Little Arkansas and Burnet Ranches.
“Even as we have gone on to repair crossings, we try and harden them as best we can to hope they might be able to survive something like that in the future,” Shell said. “We had some experience with some crossings that held up, and so we used that example.”
Shell said that the county is working on a program to provide concrete decks on bridges and a program for upgrading low water crossings throughout the county “to provide for less frequent overtopping by flood waters.”
Debris Removal
The county collected 12,000 cubic yards of debris and assisted contractors in removing an additional 45,000 cubic yards. To date, 146,000 cubic yards of debris have been removed within the county.
Shell said that he would also like to have “standby contracts for debris removal” with contractors that are already pre-approved so that county doesn’t have to navigate “the red tape” the next time a disaster strikes
“The county did a lot the first few days and then brought in contractors and it would be nice to have some contracts in place before hand,” Shell said. “You can’t plan for everything, but it would nice to be able to have a heavy debris contractor already vetted and procured. When you are trying to take care of everybody you don’t always want to have to go through the red tape at that point. I think we could be in a better spot if we had some of that stuff done ahead of time.”