quote:
Fifteen to twenty residences within the Main Floodway south of
military Highway and "i" Road were under voluntary evacuation.
Another five homes within the Main Floodway were impacted south
of Weslaco...
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WESLACO — Kenneth Hartley defied the floodwaters that threatened his home with a makeshift levee of dirt and sandbags — and he won.
“The outcome is that after everything we did to keep the water out, we beat it,” Hartley said Friday.
“Thank God everything worked out the way it did; it was a pretty big feat to keep it out of here. I have a lot of great neighbors to thank.”
Hartley, 53, is a partner in a farming company that grows onions, cabbages, carrots and other produce, much of it on land in the Lower Rio Grande Valley floodway system.
His home was built in 1942, before the floodway system was created. Today, the house sits within the floodway in the Cherry on Top neighborhood south of Weslaco.
He and his friends and neighbors began building the levee on July 10, two days after the International Boundary and Water Commission began diverting runoff from Hurricane Alex and the tropical depression that followed it into the floodway.
Using dirt Hartley bought from a Donna company and mostly his own equipment, he and his neighbors constructed a 5-foot-tall barrier that formed a C around his house. Next came roughly 4,000 sandbags stacked three high on top of the levee.
“We stayed on it probably eight straight days. … One night after we finished, I said, ‘We ain’t going anymore.’ And that’s when the water kind of started receding,” he said.
The water came close to topping the sandbags, but didn’t. The levee held up with only a few minor leaks.
Now comes the cleanup.
“It just looks like a war zone behind the house,” Hartley said. “There is so much stuff, all kinds of stuff. All the stuff that came down the floodway is just hanging in the trees. There’s stumps, all kinds of debris that’s out there.”
He lost all of his cattle fences and more than 400 citrus trees. “A 3-acre grain section, we lost all that. That’s completely gone.”
But the house was spared.
“It would be no one’s fault if I got flooded. But this is my home. It’s been my home for 25 years,” he said.
He plans to throw a party for his friends and neighbors.
A few miles from Hartley, Dan Darroch is wondering what will become of the Llano Grande Golf Course, which is also inside the floodway.
“The entire golf course, clubhouse, cart barns, all the buildings were flooded,” said Darroch, golf course manager.
“I haven’t even attempted to estimate damage. All we’re doing is cleaning up the debris and getting all the mud off.”
He said the owner is expected to arrive Sept. 8 from Canada.
“The owner’s coming and he’s going to decide. There’s golf courses closing every day because they’re going broke, and he’s going to decide what he’s going to do,” Darroch said.
