In the Hill Country and Beyond, Rural Texas Counties Lack Resources for Flood Detection

Avantika Gori is an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Houston s Rice University who is right now examining how to improve flood hazard detection and resilience in rural counties in Texas Her three-year project began in so far it s been funded with million from the National Science Foundation That s only enough she says to conduct thorough research for two counties in South and West Texas Several others were lately hit by devastating flooding in the Hill Country that killed more than people Gori spoke with the Texas Observer this week about deadly floods what can be done to prevent the next one and what she s learned from her flood research TO This has been a really sad week The Fourth of July weekend flood in the Hill Country will likely be the one of the deadliest in modern Texas history with more than endorsed deaths and even more still missing What makes the Hill Country a more dangerous place for flooding There s a combination of factors The main reason why the Hill Country is known as flash flood alley is because of the terrain here Because of all the hills you have a steep ground surface So when you get intense rainfall the rain falls on the ground and it runs off promptly because of those steep slopes and it really just accumulates in rivers and becomes this deadly wave of water that travels downstream very fast So that is what makes that area particularly dangerous in terms of floods Other parts of the state the coastal areas have floods but the terrain is more flat so people usually have time to find safety during heavy rainfall events More than million Texans or one in six people in the state live or work in areas susceptible to flooding per a draft of the first-ever statewide flood plan which was mandated under a law passed after Hurricane Harvey Do you know how several homes are vulnerable in the Hill Country I don t know The Texas Water Improvement Board is as of now remapping the floodplain so presumably they ve created updated flood models for all of the river basins Selected of them have already been circulated I think that can be a really valuable fund because those are going to be updated with the latest facts and conditions that we know of There have been conflicting reports about whether Kerr County and other counties in the Texas Hill Country already have warning systems and whether they were deployed Does your work include examining local warning systems The National Weather Arrangement has its own nationwide warning system so they have their forecast models and then they issue either a flood watch a flood warning or in this development it ended up being a flood exigency So that system is in place I think one of the issues in the Hill Country is that cell reception can be pretty spotty So I know there s a lot of reports of people not necessarily getting those alerts The question is whether a localized warning systems could be effective in various rural counties that would rely on local water level sensors rain gauges or specific kind of modeling efforts that would trigger selected kind of alert that is sent out to residents of the county In general those systems can be effective But it s not clear that even if that type of system had been in place that the outcomes would have been materially different for this flood just because it was so extreme the water levels rose so fast and all of this occurred in the middle of the night when the bulk people were sleeping There have been reports notably by the Houston Chronicle that several of the hardest hit areas including buildings at children s camps were in the -year-flood plain or even in the floodway of the river A great number of people maybe didn t know that Experts also say the nation s floodplain maps are outdated In general in the bulk rural counties across the U S the flood maps are supposedly outdated To remap the floodplain is a notable effort and rural counties don t have the materials that urban counties do I know from work in other parts of Texas that in a lot of rural counties the flood maps can be decades old The general residents likely doesn t interact with these flood maps ever so I think it s quite feasible that various people apparently would not have known they were in a flood-prone area Tell me more about your current evaluation of floods in rural Texas We re working with one county in West Texas and one that s on the coast but they re rural counties similar to the rural counties of the Hill Country in terms of guidance We re working with Hudspeth County which is close to El Paso and Jim Wells County which is on the southern Texas coast Hudspeth is basically flooding from the Upper Rio Grande area Jim Wells is mostly heavy rainfall from the Gulf storms that come in This was initially work that done through colleagues at Texas A M the Digital Pitfall Infrastructure Project DRIP where they were reaching out to a great number of different rural counties across the state and trying to help them organize and consolidate and understand their figures related to flooding to help them better understand their flood hazard From that initial work these two counties requested the largest part assistance We re working on how can we improve the models and methods and how could we evaluate possible solutions that could then alleviate several of that flood menace Extreme weather and very intense rainfall events are being informed more frequently in Texas according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration The Hill Country gets an average rainfall of inches per year In this event as much as inches of rain fell in a matter of hours in particular areas How common is that kind of rainfall across Texas In any part of the state that s going to be an extreme amount of rainfall Even in the east part of the state that s more wet to get inches of rain in a day is a very very extreme event and I think that is part of the challenge It s hard to find a very compelling trend if we zoom into one location If we look generally across the state the total amount of rainfall is not really changing but it is being condensed into more of these short high-intensity events and then longer periods of drought So we re basically getting more drought and more floods because the rainfall is being condensed into these high intensity events Are there enough rain gauges to accurately measure increasing rainfall events in the Hill Country and elsewhere in rural counties to help measure local risks In general there is a lot less flood statistics available in rural counties whether that s rainfall gauges water level gauges and in particular parts of the state the weather radar rainfall coverage is pretty spotty so all of those things make it really challenging to understand the current flood pitfall at a specific location What other factors are you looking at in your current studies in rural Texas What s the goal We are trying to first understand by collecting reports from residents about where it has flooded in their public in the past and compare that with what the Federal Urgency Management Agency FEMA floodplain shows So basically trying to quantify how different is the current flooding compared to what the FEMA floodplain map shows The second goal is to figure out how we can improve the flood map to better reflect the reality of flooding So we re going to collect new input specific to each society on the ground and see if having a richer records set can improve our flood modeling and then given that these are resource-constrained communities to find specific realistic solutions that would be low-cost easy to implement and could potentially help alleviate specific of the floods these communities have experienced in the past sparse years What could those solutions be A low cost-flood warning system Maybe deploying additional water-level or rain gauge sensors and then if rainfall or water exceeds an amount triggering a warning or alert for residents Other options are temporary or deployable flood obstructions since it s often not feasible to implement levies or hard structures because they re very costly There are increasingly new kinds of deployable temporary flood impediments that could be helpful If you were advising the rural counties in the Hill Country on next attempts what would you suggest I think as much as workable gathering and implementing systems that collect more statistics will really pay off in multiple solutions like first alerting people when there is flooding But also helping us build better models If we can enrich our dataset of flood observations then I think we can improve our ability to predict floods in the future and our ability to potentially mitigate them There certainly were a lot of camps and RV parks in the flood zone or in the -year floodplain and there s going to be debate about whether they should be moved It s a challenging issue because people want to be by the river It s a beautiful natural supply we should use in a recreational sense But maybe thinking about risk-averse decision making there may be a lesson going forward about what actions to take given a future flood watch or future flood warning Those spaces in the floodway can and should be used when it s not flooding but we need to know more about what are the situations when we need to evacuate from there And we need to make those decisions in a timely way This interview has been edited for clarity and length The post In the Hill Country and Beyond Rural Texas Counties Lack Tools for Flood Detection appeared first on The Texas Observer