Is Beryl Debris Cleared from Your Stream or Channel Yet?

9/21/2024 – Is Beryl debris cleared from the stream or channel nearest you yet? Here’s how to report fallen trees when you find them blocking waterways. Hurry. Once the equipment is gone, it will be hard to get it back.

Harris County Flood Control District and FEMA contractors have been hard at work for the last two months removing those blockages. But they have 2500 miles of channels to clear. Some of those miles, like those in Kingwood, are difficult to access and they’re massively clogged with debris.

Ensuring debris is removed involves reporting the precise location of blockages which don’t always have street addresses. If your phone doesn’t embed GPS coordinates in images, identify the location on the channel map in Harris County’s Flood Education Mapping Tool.

In many cases, clearing blockages may also involve negotiating rights of access with contractors across homeowner or trail association property. So make sure you inform your associations, too.

How Debris Creates Hidden Flood Threats

On July 8, Beryl bulldozed its way through Houston. The damage was especially bad in the Lake Houston Area. Trees fell on roofs and power lines everywhere. Many homes still await repair, though power has been restored.

But hidden out of sight, are hundreds, if not thousands of trees that fell into our streams and channels, deep in the woods where most people don’t see them. If left in place, these trees can catch others swept downstream in future floods. And the resulting log dams, can back water up into homes, causing even more damage.

And Beryl left a lot of debris.

Removing 350 Tons from One Channel in One Day

Optimal, a FEMA contractor, said they removed 350 tons of debris from one channel in Kings Forest in one day. The work involved several vehicles. That’s 700,000 pounds.

To put 700,000 pounds in perspective, the average house weighs between 80,000 and 160,000 pounds. So, that’s like removing the equivalent of 5-9 homes blocking a channel every day!

See the pictures below supplied by Chris Bloch, a Bear Branch Trail Association Director. He took them on on 9/18/24 in Kings Forest and Kingwood Lakes.

*The yellow tracked vehicle in the creek cuts logs (right) and wrestles them into another tracked vehicle which hauls them out of the woods.*

Here’s what they are up against.

It’s was a messy job. But they removed the threats.

*The 12-Ton tracked dump truck hauled the logs and brush to the Kings Forest Pool parking lot.*

*They piled it up for other trucks to take away. It all operated like an assembly line. Or should I say disassembly line?*

Some blockages may require bigger equipment which is in shorter supply according to Bloch. In those cases, contractors may have to return later. The main thing is to report all the damage you find to HCFCD now. They still have quite a few Kingwood channel sections to clear. But hurry. Hurricane season is far from over.

Posted by Bob Rehak on 9/21/24

2580 Days since Hurricane Harvey