The July 4th Flood
We decided not to publish a newsletter last month due to the chaos surrounding the heartbreaking flooding throughout the Hill Country.
About a week later, Jennifer Dean, with The Kerr County Lead, contacted us to write an article (read the full article here). She wanted to know if vegetation management could have reduced the flood’s impacts. The answer was two-fold. First, vegetation could not have stopped how hard and fast the rain falls from the sky. Second, well-established, dense vegetation will protect the soil even when the rain comes that hard and fast, especially along sensitive hillsides and riparian corridors. During less intense flash flooding, this same vegetation will help delay the rise of flood waters as it continues to protect the soil.
We asked Jennifer to mention that sinkholes could help mitigate the impacts of flooding. Sinkholes are karst openings that typically receive enormous amounts of rainwater during flood events that reduce overland stormwater volumes while recharging groundwater. However, landowners have filled in most sinkholes with trash and rubble, so the sinkholes no longer function.
Steve Nelle then wrote an excellent article on Linkedin to examine what more we could do to protect the riparian soils and vegetation.
D-MAP Tool Update
We are excited to announce that we selected a webmaster to build our D-MAP landowner decision-making tool website and to migrate our current, buggy site to a more efficient WordPress site. So expect some down time during August. Also, our next newsletter might look a little different!
We have been working on our promotional paper brochure that will serve as an introduction to the D-MAP process. Each section will contain a QR Code to take people to a landing page on the new D-MAP website. WE hope to include a link to the PDF in our next newsletter.