131. Too Much, Too Fast: San Antonio’s Floods and the Fight to Adapt

Cory Ames [00:00:03]:
This summer, Texas experienced two of the deadliest flood events in state history within just three weeks of each other. On June 12, a flash flood swept through San Antonio, overwhelming various creeks and roads. And 13 people lost their lives. Just before dawn on July 4, a wall of water surged through the Texas hill country. In Kerr county alone, 107 people were confirmed dead, at least at the time of this recording. And across the region, at least 135 lives were lost, with more still unaccounted for. The Guadalupe river rose 26ft overnight, sweeping away homes, cabins and camps, including camp mystic, where 27 campers and counselors were killed. And in San Antonio, the sudden deluge caught people in their cars, low lying areas unable to escape.

Cory Ames [00:00:56]:
Emergency crews carried out over 70 rescues. Welcome to Big City, Small Town, the podcast about the people who make San Antonio go and grow. Today, I'm your host, Corey Ames. Today we're asking a few difficult but critically important questions. What exactly happens during these flood events in June and July? What failed from infrastructure to communication? What unseen impacts are we not talking about? Pollution, ecological damage, the long term costs of being unprepared? And most critically, how do we make sure this doesn't happen again and we can avoid the acute tragedy of more lives lost? Here's the truth. We need water. We've been in drought for years, but the way it has come in recent events and what has followed has been catastrophic. So to help us understand and move forward, hopefully productively, I'm joined by two guests with deep knowledge of San Antonio's watersheds and flood.

Cory Ames [00:02:01]:
Rick Trefser, Deputy General Manager of the San Antonio River Authority, and Brendan Gibbons, board chair of RiverAid San Antonio. Together, we'll unpack what went wrong and what sand Antonio must do to be better prepared for the next time this happens, because the next time might not be years from now, it might be next season. Let's get into it. Brendan, Rick, thanks for joining me on Big City Small Town.

Brendan Gibbons [00:02:26]:
Thanks so much for having us.

Rick Trefzer [00:02:28]:
Yeah, thank you, Corey.

Cory Ames [00:02:29]:
To get us started, gentlemen, I hope that each of you could briefly explain your role and organization specifically in the context of these events. And talking about flood response, perhaps water quality, watershed health, so that we can contextualize our conversation today so folks understand the perspectives that you're coming from. Brendan, I'll, I'll turn it over to you first and foremost.

Brendan Gibbons [00:02:48]:
Yeah. My name is Brendan Gibbons and I'm a chair of River Aid San Antonio, which is a local nonprofit focused on being great stewards of our creeks and waterways. We spend a lot of time doing trash cleanups and citizen science water monitoring on our creeks. So we're out there several times a month just investigating different parts of the watershed and cleaning up debris from there. And also I have a background in journalism and I worked for San Antonio Express News and San Antonio Report as an environmental reporter, where I covered some of these issues for almost a decade.

Cory Ames [00:03:21]:
Excellent. Thank you, Brendan and Rick.

Rick Trefzer [00:03:23]:
Yeah, Corey. Rick Trefser, deputy general manager of the San Antonio River Authority. Just to sum up our organization, we like to focus on c safe, clean and enjoyable creeks and rivers. To expand on that, we really like to capture the safe and what that means is our flood management, our flood planning, the efforts that we do to help mitigate the impact of flood in our city. Clean. We have a high emphasis on water quality. We do a tremendous amount of sampling and monitoring of the health of creeks and rivers here in our watershed, our district. And then enjoyable is really about highlighting the recreation and the education components of our organization.

Cory Ames [00:04:02]:
Thank you. And so let's start first with the June 12 event, as that's specifically most acutely affected us here in San Antonio. Obviously, that came a little bit out of the news with the event July 4th in the Texas hill country, appropriately so. But unfortunately, it's still very important for us to get to the bottom of, you know, what happened on June 12th so that we can better respond and act as a community. Rick, you explained that there had been a very comprehensive report that came out on behalf of the San Antonio river for authority thereafter. Perhaps maybe that was something that not as many citizens or residents were aware to. Can you explain some of the findings in the report? Talk about the event in June 12th. What specifically happened, you know, more than just the quantity of rain that fell in so short a time?

Rick Trefzer [00:04:47]:
Yeah, I think at its most basic level, we had a very high intensity of rainfall in a concentrated area. So we've got a lot of different models and a great team of technical experts that are continuously monitoring the potential for rain events, the impact of rain events. Just prior to that event, our team had been tracking a weather system that was moving into the area. And as early as Tuesday, we, in coordination with kind of information we were taking from the National Weather Service, were anticipating somewhere around 2 to 4 inches of rain on that particular event. What ended up happening was very different, you know, 6 to 7 inches in the area where the incident occurred. Just a lot of different factors that kind of contributed to people being in a dangerous situation that obviously led to the unfortunate fatalities of that event. So, yeah, we can certainly expand on that, but as a result of that, we've certainly received lots of inquiries. You know, our focus being primarily trying to be the leader in the region for flood and mitigation flood planning.

Rick Trefzer [00:05:49]:
People were looking to us of what the explanation was and trying to understand that a little bit better. So our team, trying to be responsive to the many media inquiries that we received and that sort of thing, but also wanted to be respectful of really truly trying to understand what occurred. And so after several days, our team was able to produce a report that really outlined what the conditions were of that event and some observations of some things that could be improved and some recommendations going forward.

Cory Ames [00:06:17]:
If you could, we'd love to hear a bit more about that. San Antonio, its city limits spread so far. We can certainly have different weather on different parts of the city, which is something that can be a bit odd. At the same time, though, why was that event so overwhelming in that specific area of the city?

Rick Trefzer [00:06:37]:
Yeah, and so I'm not sure how familiar people are with the term watershed. I think that sometimes is safe for technical folks, but for the average citizen, basically, the watershed is just an area that drains into a particular creek or waterhead, watershed, excuse me, creek or river. As we're trying to capture the water that comes in through the watershed that flows into the creeks and rivers, there was a high volume of water upstream from the vital creek area. And so, you know, as that water started to come in, the water level rose very quickly. Additionally, I think the time of day was a significant factor. So beginning around 2am A significant amount of rain started to fall in that area. So within a matter of two to three hours, like I said, six to seven inches of rain there. At that point, by 4.

Rick Trefzer [00:07:22]:
5am you were starting to see people starting to move around the city. And so that area not being lit and not a low water crossing contributed to people coming onto this intersection, westbound 410 Access Road, not knowing that there was two to three feet of water on the road. And under normal conditions, that may obviously has the ability to pick up a car and move it. Unfortunately, it swept them off the road and to Battle Creek, which at that point had gathered a tremendous amount of water from upstream. And those are some of the main factors that kind of contributed to how that incident played out.

Cory Ames [00:07:53]:
Hearing that, I wonder, is it a matter of warnings or emergency alerts that we're looking for here locally? I mean, there is a reality that people do need to get from work or sometimes back home, you know, and they might not be attentively following the National Weather Service, but alerts at that point in time. But looking upstream, so to speak, we hope to not get two alerts and hope that our infrastructure can hopefully manage and mitigate the worst impacts of these types of events to the extent that it can. Is that a particular area where that's a concern at all, like infrastructure needs to be updated, reviewed, looked at again?

Rick Trefzer [00:08:32]:
Yeah, absolutely. So alerts is something that has been discussed or talked about and, you know, not only in the San Antonio event, but also the event in Kerr County. How can we give people more advanced warning of the conditions that are presenting themselves? You know, people are desensitized by alerts. So I don't know that alerts is the only answer to some of this. Sometimes there are information or alerts that are pushed out, notifications warning people of what the conditions are. But sometimes people are not responding to those notifications. So certainly that's one piece of it. We've also looked at.

Rick Trefzer [00:09:06]:
Are there some other things or deterrence that can be put in place in terms of infrastructure improvements, Whether that's barricades, other low water crossing systems, whatever that might be from a public works standpoint. But certainly we're looking at everything and working closely with our regional partners to make sure that we're trying to make the best decisions to help prevent something like this from happening again.

Brendan Gibbons [00:09:26]:
I do think that there's a bit of just a whiplash mindset difficulty in these flash floods. In particular, there's a study by Hatim Sharif, who's UTSA professor and hydrologist, who looked at flash flooding deaths Throughout Central Texas, 58% of them over the past 60 years involved vehicles, which is very much the case in this Paron vital tragedy. It's a bit different in Kirk county, where you had people sleeping in their homes or at summer camps and the floodwaters rise and take them by surprise. And maybe they don't even see alerts on their phones. But for most likely, if you were going to be in a flash flood in Texas and at risk, it's going to be in your vehicle, you know, and in this case, it was a highway off ramp coming off of 410 going into Paron. Vital. And no barriers or signage. And would anyone have been prepared mentally for something like this happening to them? I mean, before that, we were in a serious drought.

Brendan Gibbons [00:10:20]:
It hadn't rained for years, barely. Like two days before that flood in San Antonio, there was a KSAT story with someone from the Edwards Aquifer Authority saying that we were in the second worst drought in San Antonio's history since the 1950s. This most recent drought was worse than the 2011 through 2014 drought. And are you mentally prepared as a driver, as somebody who can just try to do their best to protect themselves from a flash flood when it has barely flooded or barely rained at all for years beforehand? But that whiplash from one condition to the next, from drought to flood to drought to flood, that is normal for our area. But the intensity of both of those types of events is getting worse because of a warming climate. And that's something we've not only seen from the climate models and climate scientists saying, here's what computer models predict about climate change, that we're going to see worse droughts and worse floods at the same time. But from weather data that we're already seeing, we're coming out of the second worst drought in history. We're still in drought in San Antonio, even though we've had these severe floods this year, and yet we've seen the heaviest rainfall events get even heavier.

Brendan Gibbons [00:11:23]:
You know, in 2019, I covered something called Atlas 14, which is some kind of official jargon, for an updated study of rainfall in our area by the national oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And they took decades worth of data, actual rain falling, actual rain gauges from thousands of weather stations across Texas and looked at how heavy are the average storms and are they getting heavier? And sure enough, they found they went from the heaviest storm. Storms that have a 1% chance of happening per year have gone from 10 inches in Bexar county to 11 to 13 inches, depending on what part of the county you're in. Fortunately, one piece of good news when it comes to infrastructure is that Atlas 14 has been incorporated into the city's drainage codes. So the city updated its ordinance. It says now all of our drainage has to be built to this higher storm specification because of what the real data showed. The bad part, we've got lots of infrastructure built. San Antonio is very old city.

Brendan Gibbons [00:12:18]:
It's been built in layers over time. We've got lots of parts of the city that were built before that update because it was only in 2019, and just because that's where the data showed we were. How much worse is it going to get? And that really depends on how much worse this climate change problem is going to get and how much more we keep dumping carbon into the atmosphere and heating the system. In San Antonio's climate model, climate scientists predicting the number of days with 2 inches or more of rainfall. 2 inches may not Sound like a lot, but that could be a significant flood depending on where it lands. And talking up to six or seven inches, then you have something like parent vital, much less the, the flooding in like Kerr county, where I believe it was up to 20 inches in some areas. But yeah, those heavy rainfall days are expected to like double in frequency, more than that, going from like once every two years to like four times every five years. So almost every year we're going to get something like that and spaced out with drought in between, with worse drought.

Brendan Gibbons [00:13:15]:
Very difficult psychological problem to deal with. And I just think we as citizens, a lot of what we need to do is get the mindset of both water conservation all the time, too much water unpredictably, and maybe even think about learning how to escape from our cars in a situation like that, because it could happen.

Cory Ames [00:13:35]:
Absolutely. And we'll discuss the paradox of not enough water and too much water a little bit more moving forward. But Brendan, starting with you thinking about what are some other like unforeseen impacts or longer term, midterm, long term impacts that we see from flooding events like this. Of course we have the tragedy of what can occur in the event, during the event itself. But obviously a lot of damage and waste and stuff moves throughout the city, city's watershed. River Aid San Antonio, being an organization that focus heavily on water quality and cleanups, what sort of things do folks at River Aid San Antonio see after an event like what happened on June 12?

Brendan Gibbons [00:14:15]:
Floods are definitely good at spreading trash throughout the rivers and creeks. And in relation to loss of life, loss of property, that's not as big of an issue. But still it's creating really unsightly trash everywhere. Like all of our parks and public lands and Riverdale, San Antonio, we go after that and we gather as much as we can, but really it's an endless flood of that debris coming down. Every bit of plastic or Styrofoam in a creek or river can break down and become microplastics. People downstream use the San Antonio river as a drinking water source. And then there's an effect on wildlife too. Everywhere they look for microplastics, they find it in the human body, in animals, in the bloodstream, in the brain that's being dispersed by these floods.

Brendan Gibbons [00:15:01]:
Also, it can create bacterial contamination. That's our main contaminant of concern in our creeks and rivers. What's stopping them from being approved for swimming? And when you have a big wash of all of that floodwater, stormwater off of a hard surface that's been Maybe got pet waste on it or animal feces, or sometimes there's leaks from the sewage system that can spread bacteria throughout the watershed.

Cory Ames [00:15:23]:
And Rick, from the San Antonio River Authority's perspective, is there anything else that perhaps Brent didn't mention that might be other impacts from events like this that we aren't initially aware to?

Rick Trefzer [00:15:33]:
No, I think he's. He touched on a lot of the things we focus on. As I mentioned, kind of just coming back to safe, clean and enjoyable. You've got the safe. You know, obviously we're trying to focus on the protection of people and property, but when the water does come at the volume that we're talking about for these two events, you do have other impacts, and that could be the water quality and the debris. So storm drains, streets, etc. All of those kind of funnel into creeks and rivers, which become a pretty tremendous nuisance not only to the people that live in those areas, but also aquatic habitats. Right.

Rick Trefzer [00:16:06]:
So these, the debris and the trash that comes in and has a negative impact on the wildlife. And our city has made significant investments in trying to improve the water quality of the San Antonio river with the work that we've done on the Mission Reach, the museum Reach, and we take a lot of pride in making sure that those riparian and aquatic habitats are safe and have good conditions. But then leaning into that last one, enjoyable. I'm sure you guys are familiar with the trails that we support across the San Antonio river and the miles that our operation and maintenance team takes a lot of pride in making sure that those trails are safe and clean for people to enjoy on a daily basis. So in addition to the trash, you're also seeing a lot of other debris, whether that's thatch in this most recent event, it didn't make a lot of news, but there was parts of the San Antonio river that rose between 18 and 20ft south of 410. And so that's a significant amount of water. And in not all cases, but in this case, I believe that we had somewhere upwards of 60 trees that were uprooted. And so not only do you see just the normal clippings and small bushes and vegetation that are coming through at a very high pace, when trees become uprooted, that causes not only a problem for people that are trying to enjoy the trails, but also becomes a hazard and more dangerous as it flows downstream.

Cory Ames [00:17:23]:
Well, and perhaps further along what Brendan mentioned, there is perhaps what might be the outlook of future precipitation events in San Antonio. In our region is the River Authority likewise like updating modeling for the to meet those mission goals and making the river safe and enjoyable. What are y' all looking at specifically as you consider what might be the impacts of climate and our change?

Rick Trefzer [00:17:44]:
The.

Cory Ames [00:17:45]:
Yeah. Effects on the severity of these events.

Rick Trefzer [00:17:48]:
Absolutely. I think it's great that Brendan mentioned the atlas 14. So there's other nationwide national organizations that are supporting the collection of rain data and trying to inform how you can predict what's going to be coming in the future for us. Our team is a cooperative technical partner for FEMA and so we work really closely with them to update the floodplain maps and models on our website. There is a variety of resources that can help inform our community risk maps. So you've got people that are able to type in their either residential or commercial addresses and understand what the flood risk around those particular structures are. But also we are making heavy investments in predictive capabilities. So a couple of years ago, Brendan was mentioning earlier, after Harvey, we took a hard position on trying to do a little bit better in terms of having the capability to understand predicting these weather systems that are coming through the area.

Rick Trefzer [00:18:40]:
And so we invested a pretty significant amount of money to have that capability to not only look forward, but also try to have that data that looks backwards of, okay, this is what actually happened and this is what our models are saying. So we're getting a little bit smarter and how to anticipate and respond to those types of incidents.

Brendan Gibbons [00:18:54]:
I want to talk for a second about something Rick raised with the flood maps and how they affect residents and homeowners. Because I had a very intimate experience with the flood map in my area recently. So my wife and I bought a house on the west side in Jefferson in January, before this January. So 2024, we were getting ready to close on it. It was not particularly close to a waterway or a drainage channel, so I didn't really think about this. But in the closing due diligence, the realtor came back, was like, oh, just, you're gonna have to buy flood insurance on this place. It's in the hundred year floodplain, which is the 1.1percent chance rainfall type of flood. And so I'm like, ah, Brendan, you should have known.

Brendan Gibbons [00:19:33]:
I covered this stuff for years. Like I should have. I, you know, check the flood map. Check the flood map before you buy a place, make sure it's not in the floodplain unless you want to pay for flood insurance. Because what happens if you're within that flood zone is your mortgage lender requires you to buy federal flood insurance. And I thought, oh well, there's this extra cost per month. It's worth it. I like the house, I like the price we're getting at.

Brendan Gibbons [00:19:56]:
Like, I'll just pay this flood insurance. And then I know I'm protected at least. So there's going to be worse comes to worse, it does flood. And couldn't find any record of it flooding before. We talked to our neighbor who's lived there since the 60s. Hey, has it ever flooded here? She says, no. So I'm not really too worried about it but, but I know I'm protected. So a couple months after that there was an upgrade on the drainage channel in that area, making it bigger, stronger, wider.

Brendan Gibbons [00:20:19]:
I'm not exactly sure, but making it hold more water. And I'm taken out of the floodplain in this revision that the river authority worked on with fema. No longer required to carry this flood insurance. Saves me 200 bucks a month on my escrow. Kind of excited about it because now I'm not required to pay this. I've just saved a bunch of money. And then these rain events hit this summer and it's getting me back in the mindset of I probably need to get covered again. Like I probably should be spending the money even though I'm not required to anymore to get this coverage because we don't know what the future holds.

Brendan Gibbons [00:20:52]:
We don't know how heavy these rains are going to be if we got something like the 6, 7 inches, the 20 inches, the Hurricane Harvey, 40 inches over four days. Like my house is going under. But the, the mindset of that is very difficult to get into because I'm going to just like voluntarily elect to spend more money per month on this. Now it's not as expensive when you're out of the hundred year floodplain. There's some incentive there to get covered, but I'm making that my mission this summer is to get recovered under this. Even though there's a lot of weird insurance bureaucracy with that. Our agent was having a really hard time. So that's kind of why I gave up on staying covered because like he was just having such a hard time working with the insurance company.

Brendan Gibbons [00:21:27]:
Going to go take another crack at it because I'd want to know that I have that security for the house because it's not covered in homeowners insurance. And currently if that rainbow hit, not great, things are going to happen.

Rick Trefzer [00:21:38]:
Two observations. I think that's super interesting that you are familiar with the maps. You do know the work that we do. You've. I'M certain. Been on our website and seen these tools.

Brendan Gibbons [00:21:48]:
Yep.

Rick Trefzer [00:21:48]:
But it's. It's back of mind when you're making such an important investment in your home that it was an afterthought. There are a large part of our community that's not aware of those resources, doesn't know that flooding is a potential issue in the areas they might be purchasing property. And so that's the battle that we're fighting against, is people's just lack of awareness or understanding of what the impact is. Because as you mentioned, you had the good fortune of being removed from the floodplain, from infrastructure. But not all flood infrastructure is designed to support a flood at the level that we're talking about for these two events.

Brendan Gibbons [00:22:21]:
Because imagine if it was, imagine how expensive it would be to build and maintain all the concrete necessary to deal with the most extreme event you could possibly imagine. It's just prohibitively expensive. Like the tax. We don't have enough taxes to support building everywhere that level of protection. So then where the river authority, the city and the county all have to come down and decide working with their engineers is like, what is the level of investment that makes the most sense for the tax base and to be as protective as possible. And that's a hard choice. And that's kind of why I'm talking about people should protect themselves to the extent that they can.

Rick Trefzer [00:22:56]:
And back to the point you mentioned earlier, the mindset, right? So people know that we have these types of events, but then time passes. And so when the time passes and people forget the magnitude of this level of rain and they're being faced with competing needs in the community, whatever they might be, it's easy to not focus on the investment that needs to be made from a flood control or flood improvement standpoint.

Brendan Gibbons [00:23:20]:
And here's the flip side of the channel, because, you know, there's another layer to it with river aid. That channel that is built to handle more flood infrastructure that took me out of the floodplain. That channel feeds into Woodlawn Lake. RiverAid San Antonio got a contract with the city of San Antonio last year to go out every month and clean up all the trash that flows into Woodlawn Lake. So, you know, this channel is now capable of funneling more debris and pollutants into the lake that I'm going out there in a kayak to clean every month. And I'm just thinking of the irony of this as I'm paddling around picking up trash. I mean, Woodlawn Lake, I love it. It's Beautiful and scenic, but it's not the kind of water you want to be covered in, like I was at the end of the day, like all of us river aid volunteers who went out there and did that were.

Brendan Gibbons [00:24:00]:
So there is a bit of a trade off too, of hardening with concrete and impervious surface. The structures needed to protect us from flooding also brings this trade off of funneling more pollutants downstream. So that is why, too, getting flood insurance at your home, if at all possible, if you can afford it, I think is huge. Being flood prepared, but also thinking about downstream properties from you and how can you make your property as flood, flood resilient as possible, as much of a sponge as possible, able to soak up the rainfalls that we do get. I just put in a patio area recently. Could have paved it, but I decided to do decompose granite because it was way cheaper, number one. Number two, it infiltrates. So any rainfall that'll go on there will soak into the ground.

Brendan Gibbons [00:24:42]:
It's easier to maintain. It was easier to do by myself without pouring a bunch of concrete. And I encourage people to look at solutions like that rather than adding more hardscape to their properties.

Cory Ames [00:24:52]:
And that, I think is an interesting pivot for the conversation because going back to the paradox of not enough water for much of the time and then too much water in a span of hours, call it a day, if that's generous, or, you know, as these last rains have been the span of a few weeks, we are really starting to have rainy seasons and dry seasons very severely. But after we look at the critical means of protecting, you know, life in property, how can we then start to see that quantity of water really as an opportunity? And that bridges me to ask you, Rick, about perhaps areas that we could survey around San Antonio or that the River Authority is looking at in events like this that manage the water particularly well because we've had a lot of restoration projects done over the last years, I believe we've also slated Westside Creek restoration project to come here over the next decade. And so how do those areas, for one or others I might not be thinking of, perform in contrast to the areas that certainly see a much greater level of damage and impact and danger?

Rick Trefzer [00:26:01]:
Yeah, obviously, I think it's well documented that the amount of impervious cover has an impact on how drainage happens and the impact that it has when it gets into storm systems, etc. We've spent a lot of time over the past, let's call it, decade, trying to look into things like Nature based solutions and green infrastructure. And those things similar to some of the solutions Bren's talking about at his own personal home. But on a much larger scale. You think about the mission reach and what will be coming with the Westside Creek's restoration process to remove concrete channelization and bring the land back to its more natural state. Which think has proven to help address some of the volume and the velocity of the water. I'll highlight an example from the vital Creek event in the report. One observation that's made is that the channelized system performed as it was intended to, but things are moving very quickly through there because those channelized systems are designed to get the water out as quickly as possible.

Rick Trefzer [00:27:03]:
But on the other side of Paramvital, there was a Bexar county capital improvements project that was a flood improvement project that was bringing the land back to its more natural state. And that's where the water started to infiltrate and actually slowed down. As tragic as it is, that's where most of the vehicles had stopped. And because of this improvement that was invested in many years ago to bring the land back to its natural state, slow the water down, let it infiltrate. And so I think that has been something we're promoting and we've talked to different municipalities and other things of how we can bring that back into or incentivize that for when people are trying to develop. Because we all know the development's not going to stop. And so the decisions that we make related to nature based solutions or how we design these drainage systems will have an impact in the future.

Brendan Gibbons [00:27:50]:
I encourage everyone to go look up San Antonio River Authority low impact development manual. Especially if you are in the landscape design business or you own commercial property. But even to get some ideas for your own home, if you want to start implementing things like that that you can't. They created a really excellent design manual with lots of different types of. Of this green infrastructure they call it. I call them rain gardens as shorthand because it's really poetic thing. But a rain garden is one type of them. There's all different kinds of swale ditches that have natural plants in them or like little filter areas.

Brendan Gibbons [00:28:24]:
And they look very attractive and they involve a lot of native plants. They're good for pollinators a lot of the time. They're good wildlife habitat. And they're good for reducing the amount of just heat baking off of pavement and asphalt and concrete. And there are some good resources out there for people who choose to put that on their land. And it would be great to see more of those being encouraged or incentivized in the city codes. Because there's some areas where they are, I believe, and correct me if I'm wrong, in the Mission Reach, there's an area near the Pearl where it's a requirement, right?

Rick Trefzer [00:28:54]:
Yeah. There are overlays and different requirements that we've done through the Unified Development Code in coordination with city of San Antonio. We've engaged and had very productive conversations with the development community trying to understand how do we find that balance. Right. Between progress and trying to make sure that we have we minimize the impact of infrastructure. So. And really just trying to look at it through the lens of multi benefit. Right.

Rick Trefzer [00:29:18]:
So some of these things and these solutions could be multi benefit. Right. So Mission Reach is a flood control project. But I think if you ask the average citizen, is that a flood control project or is that a recreation project? I think majority of folks would say it's a recreation project because they're just so accustomed to riding and walking up and down the trails. But in the event of a large storm, it's acting 100% like a flood control. It's getting the water out of San Antonio and protecting the properties in the area.

Brendan Gibbons [00:29:45]:
So like people who may not have been in San Antonio that long, the Mission Reach used to look something like the west side creeks. Right. Where it was just a channel shaped like a trapezoid and then there's concrete in the bottom of it. For the most part. You turned that into a beautiful natural wildlife habitat, park space. And you didn't sacrifice any of the flood control properties. Right.

Rick Trefzer [00:30:04]:
We've done studies that have shown the improvement in water quality. We've obviously seen a tremendous amount of avian species come back to the area. The vegetation is more is native to the area and so it thrives in the conditions that we have here in the region. And so it really is just, it's hitting multiple benefits. And I think it's just a true testament that you can find the balance of those different competing needs.

Brendan Gibbons [00:30:29]:
One more side benefit of that is that during those slow soaking rain times or during drier times and we're not getting those massive floods, it is treating the water passively and it's improving water quality. And if we're ever going to get to the point where we could swim in some of our creeks and rivers again and have that as a cooling off point to deal with ever hotter summers, that's the kind of solutions we're going to need. Spread out all over the city, what.

Cory Ames [00:30:52]:
Do we then find as perhaps the resistance to this, is it just time and investment? Because we're talking about in one context that costs will accumulate one way or another. Your anecdotal example of flood insurance is one. So the costs, particularly on insuring properties, both residential or commercial, whatever it might be. But then of course the extreme acute costs be that the loss of San Antonians in events like this, but then all the damage and cleanups and everything to follow. And so I see costs whether we don't choose to adapt to various more nature based solutions. And in my opinion, I see investments when we look at developing infrastructure like that, we're talking about perhaps as well. Confluence park is a really good example. I think it has the permeable parking lot.

Cory Ames [00:31:38]:
There's a lot of ways to where we can get creative, but it also has a connection to that Mission Reach project. Where do we see the resistance like from an ecosystem or systemic perspective? Are we just not moving fast enough on these types of things or is it hard to get much wider scale support for those? Even if we do have a lot of data to back it up, Are we just not moving? It just takes time to develop those projects.

Brendan Gibbons [00:32:00]:
One thing about some of that type of landscaping that soaks in water better is it does take a, just a different way of doing things. I wouldn't even say necessarily more maintenance or more frequent maintenance, but just a different way of approaching maintenance. So one of River Aid, San Antonio's volunteer projects is to work on a low impact development installation on Lawrence Creek on the north side. And that was installed originally by the Greater Edwards Aquifer alliance because it's right above the Edwards Aquifer recharge zone. Our water supply, what's flowing off of there could go underground and make it into the water supply. So a bit of a different purpose than flood prevention, but it has that added benefit. And so this is a sediment trap, like right near a parking or right near a street. Water flows off of this neighborhood into there.

Brendan Gibbons [00:32:45]:
A lot of the sediment drops out and gets trapped there. It goes down a green swale ditch area and into a detention pond that is off the main channel. And a lot of water can accumulate in there and soak down into the ground. And then if it's a big rain, it'll continue flowing on past that and over some kind of berms. We built into that area. And it takes quarterly maintenance to go in and clear out the sediment from the trap at the very beginning of it. And so it's like a weird volunteer project. A lot of Times we'll have people come out and we'll.

Brendan Gibbons [00:33:14]:
We'll go after invasive species like, or most often cleaning trash. This one's just odd because it's like taking sediment out of the sediment trap and then going. Helping build up these berms, these little water speed bumps basically, that slow down the flood water. So it's just a different approach to trying to do a different thing than you might if you had a concrete trapezoid channel and you're just going out there with a weed whacker and just weed whacking all of it and bagging that up and leaving. So some of it's training landscape maintenance people to do things a little bit differently. It's just different than the way we've always done it. But there are some cost difference as well, and I think that's where some of the resistance comes from. I think Rick may be able to.

Rick Trefzer [00:33:52]:
Speak to that a little better. Yeah, I think that's. I think that's fair. You referenced earlier the Low Impact Development Manual. We've got a team of folks that have spent a lot of time researching and understanding some of the best practices. And we're often hit with the response that, that operations and maintenance of these solutions may be more time consuming and they may be more expensive. And we've tried to find the balance and get input from the communities on what. What is the compromise? What is.

Rick Trefzer [00:34:20]:
Because it may be. It is. I think it's safe to say that it's different than what people are traditionally used to. Planting St. Augustine grass and mowing that and putting these other solutions in place that could look very aesthetically pleasing is just not what people are defaulting to, I think. So changing the mindset and really understanding the benefits associated with those practices is something that we're working on. But expanding on that, I think to your question earlier, is it is less expensive to plan and prepare than it is to respond to these events. And so it's easy to say that today, but in six months when something else in the news cycle has risen, I think that becomes a little bit more difficult for policymakers to really continue to lean in and adopt some of these recommendations because it is.

Rick Trefzer [00:35:04]:
It's very costly. Right. And that is competing with a lot of other very needy causes and things throughout the community. But I think there's two different ways to look at this. There's locally and the things that we're doing and working with Bexar county and the city of San Antonio, where we're looking closely at kind of some Things that we can do from investments in alert systems or improved infrastructure, et cetera, that I think we'll be working on over the next months to come up with some recommendations that will inform some things we put in our next annual budget. But also I would point out that at the state level there's also regional flood planning. So back in 2019, the legislature put together a process to do state and regional flood planning. And so the San Antonio River Authority serves as the sponsor for that for this region 12.

Rick Trefzer [00:35:47]:
So there's lots of information on that. So they've got a group of experts and other stakeholders that are contributing to identifying what are these projects, what are the risks associated with these projects and trying to generate an order of magnitude cost for these projects. So not only can we look at those locally as solutions to some of the needs that we have that at a state level, as we start to, as we're wrapping up the legislature session and we're heading into a special session because of some of the things that the governor still wants to achieve, putting that out there in front and say we've done a lot of work studying some of these issues and here are the recommendations that might address some. Obviously not all because the cost is so high.

Cory Ames [00:36:25]:
Well, is there anything that the River Authority is specifically watching with the communing of this special session?

Rick Trefzer [00:36:31]:
Yeah, I think some of the things that we've kind of been focusing on is the flood warning systems. I'm not sure we've. I don't believe we've spoken about it, but we've got bearflood.org it's a system that we've run in conjunction with Bexar county and the city of San Antonio that gives people a website that they can go and see all the low water crossings throughout the area and they can determine whether that low water crossing is passable or if it's closed. So as things get shut off by public works departments, those lights turn red. And so it can warn drivers of an upcoming issue or something they might need to take an alternative route. We've also spent some time and our team has done great work trying to integrate it with things like Waze because we understand if we're already using these apps and we're doing these things that might push that information to the forefront, that helps them make better decisions as they're navigating the city. Because we also know it's difficult if you're in transit. Like you said, most of these things are happening in a vehicle and we're not expecting somebody to be in their car on that barefoot.

Rick Trefzer [00:37:25]:
So we're trying to find ways to push that information versus having people pull it, if that makes sense.

Brendan Gibbons [00:37:31]:
I also wonder if we could do a better job of educating people, just like we all learned how to do how to escape a burning building in a fire drill as children and learned about stop, drop, and roll. Can we do better learning how to evade and escape a flood? If you're in your vehicle and the number one, turn around, don't drown. Everyone hears that message all the time. People still don't obey it for crazy reasons. It only takes two feet of moving water to move a truck. So never drive through it. Just. There's just no reason to.

Brendan Gibbons [00:37:59]:
No matter. Even if you think it's shallow, even if you think you've seen it before, you don't know how deep that water is. So driving even through big puddles is not the best idea. So avoiding that. But there are cases, I think in the parent vital case, you have people backed up on a ramp. In that case, I really think people have to be prepared to roll down their window, leave it open, and even be willing to exit the vehicle if it looks like the water's rising and it's coming up to their area, abandon the car and get to high ground. Like, I know that might sound extreme, and I guess in the craziest scenario, it's like you're abandoning your car when you might not actually have to. Better that than your life.

Brendan Gibbons [00:38:33]:
And I did listen to some of the 911 calls that some of the local media obtained from. From that day. And I don't want to claim I don't. They only played some of them. I think that was a good choice of people who survived. I didn't hear a case where a 911 dispatcher gave somebody instructions on what to do to escape. They mostly said, wait, rescue is coming. We've got units out there.

Brendan Gibbons [00:38:55]:
And so I do wonder, and again, I'm not an emergency management expert, and I don't know if they ever. There are any cases where they did encourage them to escape their vehicle. But I do wonder if that could be something that the 911 dispatchers do if it seems appropriate. Just like they would tell you to leave a burning building, leave a car that's about to get trapped in a flood. So I think there's more we can do in terms of communicating that threat. Because, you know, again, that Hateem Sharif study, almost 60% of flood deaths involve a vehicle. That's a huge danger point in our area.

Cory Ames [00:39:24]:
Well, it's difficult because we have these two sides. There's very much so the importance of the immediate safety, like what to do in an emergency. And I'll speak anecdotally as someone who's weather obsessed. It's even unpredictable from my vantage of seeing forecasted rain or otherwise and getting caught by surprise from a safe vantage at home or otherwise, but caught by surprise by both an event happening for one, even rain at all. But the severity, at least this last season I was quite surprised because that's something that I watched rather closely and it seems quite difficult to really fully anticipate the severity of them and when they're going to happen. So it's very important to know what to do. And that's for example, I grew up in Washington state. We didn't have a fire season and then now my family's still there.

Cory Ames [00:40:10]:
That's something that's ever present and the level of safety that you need to have around that type of season, what to do, how to evacuate, all that kind of stuff. The context has changed and so maybe it's worth updating what is just common educational safety based information for people to be aware of. But still then got to look at the long term perspective of how do we reduce danger in the first place and what would y' all recommend from just an average San Antonio's perspective if they can feel a little bit of sense of helplessness. Obviously we talked about home infrastructure upgrades for one, but looking at what, what they should call on the city to do or not do as they're either in contact with their own representatives, city council members or what have you. We got a bond cycle coming up. What sort of things might be important to pay attention to from that? Yeah. What do you recommend people look out for, advocate for what have you?

Brendan Gibbons [00:41:01]:
I recommend before if it's raining before any trip they take, go to bear flood.org to look at the closed water crossings.

Rick Trefzer [00:41:08]:
Appreciate the flood there. It's nice.

Brendan Gibbons [00:41:10]:
Definitely recommend learning how to escape a flooding vehicle. As far as like advocating for what local governments can do, I think they can advocate to the city, to their city council representative, start thinking about how can we update our ordinances to require infrastructure that soaks in water. I think that's just going to bring such a huge benefit for water quality and for if done widely enough, flood prevention and just to be create, to be showing that there's a demand for that. Because I think that could help overcome the resistance and some creating a culture a bit more of where that's what we Expect our land to do is to soak in water as much as possible. And I think, unfortunately, I mean, you talk about Washington didn't have a fire season and now does winter storm Uri an example of a climate catastrophe here in San Antonio that was just worsened by or in Texas here that was just worsened by a changing climate. A winter storm like that had happened 10 years before, but. And there was massive power outages and. But like the next, it's just so much more intense in 2021 when it hits.

Brendan Gibbons [00:42:13]:
I interviewed a real estate economist around that time who studied flood awareness in the real estate market. And he said the market memory was about two years for people forgetting that a certain property had flooded before they go in to buy it. Preparation for all kinds of these disasters is just difficult. With our human psychology, we were focused on the threats in front of us. But some of the deadliest things that could happen are going to become more frequent. They are going to become more serious in a warming world. And anything we can do to reduce those emissions and put a tamper down on the cause is going to improve our lives because we're just seeing these events get worse and more and more extreme. And there's no limits to how bad that could get.

Brendan Gibbons [00:42:56]:
So I think people need to remember that climate change, global warming, it's a matter of degrees, it's a matter of increments. Every choice you make to emit fewer emissions, like to take your bike instead of or the bus instead of driving, has an incremental impact. Everything that our government does in terms of regulating the fossil fuel industry, it has an incremental impact. It's not like suddenly we've passed the point of no return. Every little bit helps.

Rick Trefzer [00:43:21]:
Yeah, I think just a couple of reactions to that. One, being super thoughtful about where we develop. I think there's still instances where people are building up to or in the floodplain. We have 28 dams. There was recently an article in mysa.com that talked about the dams, like the things that people just don't see that are in their backyards, that are helping with flood protection. But we still, even though we cut easements and own some of these properties, we've got people that are building right up next to dams. And so understanding the risk associated with where you're doing that, that's one thing. If we can really disincentivize development around flood risk, that I think helps in the long term.

Rick Trefzer [00:43:59]:
I think from an advocacy standpoint, investments or bringing forward innovations that help with alerts and flood Awareness, we are looking at different technologies and obviously like I mentioned earlier, we're going to be looking beyond just our region of what are people doing out there to help protect their communities. But from a policy standpoint, I think Brendan's right. If we can advocate and, or at least people have people thinking about what are some nature based solutions, what are some things that can help mitigate some of the flood risk. I think not letting those be the first items that are value engineered out of capital projects, I think that's an unfortunate reality. We all know that costs are going up for all sorts of capital projects. But we've tried to advocate very hard to incorporate low impact development, green infrastructure, nature based solutions, whatever you want to, whatever your favorite term is, whatever you want to refer to it as, it's still an important part and things that should be considered as you're, you're making improvements. But those are often the easiest things for people to remove from projects. So I think advocating there, but then I think just people generally coming up with creative ways to engage people in the conversation.

Rick Trefzer [00:45:07]:
So you know, after two years and everybody's moved on from what's happened, they still have some general awareness about where they live and where they work, about what the flood risks are, use those tools and just have some self awareness around those issues.

Cory Ames [00:45:20]:
Well, and I think that there's a very potent narrative to be cultivated around the public assets that are created from these various low impact development projects. As we've talked about throughout this conversation, the various parks, areas of recreation. Like you said, people might not be aware that those are flood management projects as well, but they're also assets to the city that people love to enjoy and use. And I think that the conversation around emissions from an individual perspective can sometimes be overwhelming and hard to really contextualize all those choices. But I gotta think that there's great opportunity too in the advancement of native vegetation because there's so many multiple benefits from that one. It seems to make the city cooler, right? Like a tree versus concrete. That's gonna make a huge impact. It makes the soil and the land around it more of a sponge than it is something impervious like concrete.

Cory Ames [00:46:13]:
Water's gonna move fast and drain fast and it's aesthetically pleasing too. And so we have so many issues that we're facing and it seems like this growing climate crisis, it's hotter, you know, our storms are more severe. And I just can't see many other solutions being proposed that can offer so much great benefit. It feels like it's a dollar really well spent from a city perspective.

Brendan Gibbons [00:46:35]:
I think at River Aid San Antonio, we're going out and we're working on keeping those areas clean right now. So I think sometimes there's an urge to take on whatever you can with your own two hands. And River Aid San Antonio will put you to work on that kind of thing. Actually, we have some people going up to Kirk county that we've been twice now to help with cleanups in that area. Some of our volunteers and planning to continue to do that once a month. Check us out on social media, River AIDSAntonio or RiverAid San Antonio.org to find ways to get plugged in and become one of our grassroots steward army, where we're going to be working on this kind of thing.

Rick Trefzer [00:47:10]:
Yeah, that's a great point. I'd be remiss if I didn't promote our volunteers as well. River Warriors, I think you can't have enough volunteers. This work is just so much. The scale is something that an entity like ours is not capable of. After every rain event hitting every single creek and the river, we, I think, take a lot of pride in making sure that we are hitting the trash. We've seen in incidences where there could be multiple rain events within a week that near $100,000 worth of just cleanup costs. And so I think the dollars are staggering.

Rick Trefzer [00:47:40]:
And so where there are opportunities for people to volunteer, whether it's River Aid or whether it's through our river warriors program, we're trying to organize events to get people engaged in the community because I think people really enjoy those types of events. And you can get the instant gratification of the work that you've done.

Cory Ames [00:47:57]:
Well, it changes the relationship that you have to the waterway. It feels like I had the pleasure getting on the canoe at Woodlawn Lake with Charles Blank, the executive director of River Aid San Anton. My camera. And that's a place I live nearby, but I've never been on the water like that. I've seen River AIDS work that way and it very much so had a. Had an impact on me. You mentioned those cleanup costs, Rick there. That was something that I didn't actually consider.

Cory Ames [00:48:21]:
First and foremost as well, are there upstream solutions that are being offered from a pollution standpoint to prevent more of that waste being run into the waterways on an average rain event or a more severe one?

Rick Trefzer [00:48:34]:
Yeah, I think both. The San Antonio River Authority, Bexar county, the city of San Antonio, have for years been trying to find the answer to that. We've invested in pilot projects for trash booms and barriers or nets or whatever the functionality might be. We've tried a variety of things and haven't found one yet that really is successful in our environment. And so I think that's exactly the reason we're here today, is that the velocity and the volume of water is so strong when you have these heavy rain events. Some of the systems, and we've had very structurally sound engineered systems that have failed because of the amount of thatch and debris and things that come through these waterways. And we're still trying to figure out how, because obviously if there's a way to stop some of this stuff before it gets to the creek or the lakes or whatever it might be, that would be ideal. But we haven't found quite yet the system that's going to answer that call.

Brendan Gibbons [00:49:26]:
River Aid San Antonio has a great project with a group called the Osprey Project. It's actually a small business, and funding from Bexar county, we've installed these two litter booms on Salado Creek on different parks in the east side. And they do accumulate litter behind them during the normal flow of the river and smaller rain events. But they are built to break open and release during heavy rains, which is unfortunate because when that happens, you lose everything that you've accumulated behind there. So it's not really built for the most extreme of extreme floods. But I think during just the normal course of events, we have people go out there and we're cleaning them a couple times a month. And it works to consolidate a lot of the trash in one area. And we'd like to see those deployed in more places where it makes sense.

Rick Trefzer [00:50:10]:
Yeah, I don't mean to imply that those are not worthwhile, but I think it's just we're trying to find the system that is addressing the different conditions that you see. And under normal circumstances that absolutely those systems work well. But if you don't go in there and clean them out and make sure that you capture it before something else comes in and breaks them free, that becomes a challenge.

Brendan Gibbons [00:50:27]:
Then you've lost your load of waste. So, yeah, we do have to go out there regularly and we have funding to maintain that. But it's a search for funding to be able to afford to do that. And anytime those would be installed anywhere, they'd have to have regular maintenance. It's just what we were talking about with maintaining the sponge infrastructure, the low impact development, green infrastructure. It's a different way of doing things, It's a different approach. But some of these things could be job creation. You know, you think about the work needed to maintain these systems.

Brendan Gibbons [00:50:54]:
There's a lot of great like manual labor type work for people in there. And so I think that funding could be well invested in a city where we do need more jobs.

Cory Ames [00:51:04]:
Absolutely. Brendan Rick, thank you so much for taking the time. Any final notes here? We covered a lot of ground. Anything we feel like we left out before we wrap up?

Brendan Gibbons [00:51:11]:
I don't think so. I think it was a great conversation.

Rick Trefzer [00:51:13]:
Yeah, we just encourage people to utilize the tools. Obviously they can reach out to us through our Contact us on our sariverauthority.org if they need help understanding those tools or just have basic questions that can improve their understanding and awareness of some of the risks in our community. I think that'd be a great opportunity. So thank you. Excellent.

Cory Ames [00:51:30]:
We'll have all things mentioned here linked up in our show post@bigcity small town.com Brendan Rick, thanks again.

Rick Trefzer [00:51:36]:
Appreciate it. Thank you.

Cory Ames [00:51:40]:
Thanks for listening to or watching this episode of Big City Small Town. If you enjoyed it, please send it to a friend, share it with a colleague, helping us to keep telling San Antonio's most meaningful stories. And if you haven't yet, sign up for the San Antonio Something, my weekly newsletter where I share things to do, places to explore, and people to get to know in the city. Just head to coriames.com to subscribe. Also, be sure to check out Monday Musings, Bob Brevard's weekly newsletter at bigcitysmalltown.com Big City Small Town is brought to you by Weston Urban Building, the city our children want to call home, and by Geekdom, where startups are born and smart ideas become businesses. Thanks again. We'll see you next time.