Navasota discusses concerns of flooding at Highway 6
NAVASOTA, Texas (KBTX) - Significant rainfall has led to flooding in the region over the last several days, causing a concern the Navasota River might flood at Highway 6.
KBTX took a trip to look at the river first-hand and spoke with Navasota’s City Manager, Jason Weeks, regarding their concern.
As of Saturday afternoon, the water level was at 180 feet, 22 feet higher than usual and the river was 27 feet below Highway 6.
“There’s nowhere else for the water to go, the ground is saturated and so the only way it is to go downstream, and it’s going to go right through this area, and at some point, we can see that the river is gonna start increasing,” said Weeks. “We got to keep monitoring that.”
Because water was released from Lake Limestone’s dam to avoid a burst, that extra water flowed into the Navasota River causing water levels to rise.
“The rain that has occurred up at Lake Limestone, so they need to release that water out of the dam, and that flows into the Navasota River. As you can see behind us, there’s quite a bit, that’s about 27 feet from going over Highway 6 here,” said Weeks.
The city of Navasota prepared for the potential flood as the water was increasing by about 1 foot every hour on Friday.
“Yesterday we put out some notices to the residents and the community ‘Hey situation awareness, there’s a high probability at some point the water could go over highway 6′ and we wanted to make sure all of our residents were aware of that and give that situational awareness,” said Weeks.
The city of Navasota is watching updates from the National Weather Service and is working with TDEM , TxDOT, and Grimes and Brazos County to monitor the river.
The Grimes County Emergency Management Coordinator, David Lilly, sent a statement to KBTX regarding the river:
“We were measuring the river level below the bridge on Hwy 6 every three hours yesterday and it was rising about 1 foot an hour. Today we checked it at 6:00 am and it had only risen another foot since yesterday, and our most recent measurement at 1:30 shows it has dropped slightly. Even with additional runoff expected from further rains this weekend we do not anticipate that the river will rise high enough to cross the road or bridge.”
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