Emily Davenport, Valdosta Stormwater Manager, sent a letter 2 June 2014
to attendees of the 6 May 2014 Army Corps of Engineers presentations,
with paper materials attached, and a note that they are also online at
Stormwater Division, Regional Flooding. [Not there anymore, but see updated first bullet item below. 2018-01-28 -jsq]
This one is just the presentation by the Corps.
See also: Continue reading
In these videos of
the initial flooding study
by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers at the Valdosta City Council Work Session,
you can see they’re the Corps, all right: they want to build a levee.
They did emphasize that this was just an initial study on
what could be done inside Valdosta, and their main conclusion
was that there was enough need to indicate federal interest,
as in possibilities of getting federal funding for solutions.
City Manager Larry Hanson got the Corps to confirm (several times)
that Valdosta alone couldn’t stop the flooding, since the vast
majority of floodwaters comes from upstream
on the Withlacoochee and Little Rivers.
Later that same evening in response to citizen questions
at the Valdosta City Hall Annex, the Corps clarified more that
they did understand there were issues of impervious surfaces
and development and loss of wetlands and they wanted to
do a much larger study of the entire watershed,
which could take several years to accomplish.
They kept emphasizing that the Suwannee River watershed
is one of the largest in the country, and there are also
flooding problems on the Suwannee River, which could be important
for obtaining federal dollars.
As we already knew, Valdosta has funded projects already started to move the Withlacoochee Wastewater Treatment Plant (WWTP) uphill and to add a force main to prevent manhole overflows. People downstream in Florida may be relieved to hear something is being done.
Here’s a video playlist, followed by images of the Corp’s slides and of the City Council, and some notes.
Continue reading
Tonight we get to hear twice about the long-awaited
flooding study by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers:
once with no citizen input at the Valdosta City Council Work Session,
and then with citizen input at Valdosta City Hall Annex.
Presumably this study will say something about the Withlacoochee Wastewater Treatment Plant (WWTP), the new
force main to prevent manhole overflows, and
maybe some upstream measures to keep quite as much water from getting there.
This study only addresses issues within the city limits of Valdosta,
not the larger watersheds upstream on the Withlacoochee and Little Rivers
and downstream: that will take more funding.
People
downstream in Florida may be relieved to hear something is being done.
The city of Valdosta does have a plan to fix its sewer problems;
it’s funded; and it’s moving along rapidly.
In the Spotlight on Valdosta’s front page says:
Click here for updates to Valdosta’s Sanitary Sewer System improvement projects.
That link leads to Valdosta Sanitary Sewer System Improvements [Since moved by Valdosta to a new URL. 2018-01-28 -jsq], Continue reading
Once again, Valdosta famous into Florida again for wastewater spill, and Florida residents are tired of it.
WCTV 1 March 2014, Georgia Spill Leads To Warning In Florida
[Matt] Meersman and his friends enjoy visiting the Suwannee River to train for canoe races. According to the City of Valdosta, heavy rains have caused about 7.5 million gallons of highly treated waste water to wash into the Withlacoochee River, which connects to the Suwannee. Signs are posted around the Suwannee River State Park to let people know about the possible dangers of swimming in the water.
“When it’s impacted by stuff like this, it makes it hard on us to think about it as the pristine place that we like to think of it as,” said Meersman.
Meersman says there are other rivers around the area they can practice on in the meantime, but he says he’s tired of the spills.
“It’s bad enough Continue reading
The candidates were almost unanimous on
SPLOST VII and
how to prevent JK situations,
but more varied on other questions.
Roy Copeland, billed as “Valdosta attorney”
(but perhaps known better to LAKE readers as VLCIA board member and former Chairman)
was the moderator,
assisted by
Valdosta Fire Chief and
Thirty Club member
J.D. Rice.
They took questions from the audience and recognized their host,
Pastor Floyd Rose of Serenity Church.
You may wonder as I do why city council candidates were answering
about graduation rates.
Matthew Woody wrote for the VDT 21 October 2013, ‘Let the games begin’. Here’s the list of qualified candidates. As usual, nobody showed up from the smaller cities, although at least one Valdosta candidate, Richard Miller, spoke up for the smaller cities about SPLOST.
Received 27 October 2013. -jsq
I have had a number of folks contact me about the upcoming SPLOST VII referendum and inquiring about a MOST. Trying to talk about all of this in as few a words as I can is not easy. But to give you some perspective—the city’s general fund budget is $32M. $5.9M of the revenue for this fund comes from property taxes. Based on the city tax digest a mill is worth $1.5M. The experts say 50.2% of the sales tax is paid by out of towners. In the opinion of some folks, it is closer to 30%. Pick the experts or local guesses ….it still is a significant amount. It clearly is very beneficial to the citizens of Valdosta and Lowndes County.
By now many have heard about a MOST or Municipal Option Sales Tax.
In the first part of this year—the city of Valdosta was faced with Continue reading
More good news at Valdosta’s other wastewater treatment plant, Mud Creek,
where more solar is being installed;
more about that at tonight’s meeting of the Valdosta-Lowndes County
Industrial Authority.
Mud Creek
was already upgraded in 2012 to handle expected wastewater flow.
Here’s tonight’s agenda:
Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial AuthorityContinue reading
Tuesday, October 15, 2013 5:00 p.m.
Industrial Authority Conference Room
2110 N. Patterson Street
Agenda
Valdosta wants to survey to prepare for moving and upgrading the
Withlacoochee Wastewater Treatment Plant.
The City Council is awarding
retirement benefits,
and the
employee of the month is three people this month.
One rezoning has been
withdrawn
and another
is up for action
Thursday.
Plus somebody didn’t like the Valdosta Historic Preservation Commission
actually requiring preservation and is appealing
to the City Council.
It would be interesting to see what’s in that WWTP surveying and engineering
contract and which parking is being appealed, but Valdosta City Council
doesn’t publish its agenda packets online, unlike for example
Augusta,
which has the second highest high tech job growth in the country.
Here’s the agenda. They also have a Work Session Tuesday 8 October 2013 at 5:30 PM, inconveniently the same time as the Lowndes County Commission Regular Session.
AGENDAContinue readingREGULAR MEETING OF THE VALDOSTA CITY COUNCIL
5:30 P.M., Thursday, October 10, 2013
COUNCIL CHAMBERS, CITY HALL
Flood control to keep water out of houses seems like a good idea,
but it turns out that it causes the flood control measures to keep
needing to be raised higher, and it encourages people to build
too close to flooding areas, plus
“rare and catastrophic events take place”.
Like the 2009 “700 year flood” and the
four or more floods this year
that have overflowed the Withlacoochee Wastewater Treatment Plant.
In our case, there are also the issues of widespread clearcutting
and buildings and streets with impervious cover.
The local runoff containment requirements in the various local government zoning codes may be
like levees: “flood control
structures might even increase flood risk as protection from
frequent flooding reduces perceptions of risk”.
This encourages human settlements in floodplain areas, which are then vulnerable to high-consequence and low-probability events.Much simpler just not to give out building permits for flood zones. Or we could put medical buildings right next to a creek, assuming because it’s never flooded it never will….
Socio-hydrology: conceptualising human-flood interactions, G. Di Baldassarre, A. Viglione, G. Carr, L. Kuil, J. L. Salinas, and G. Bloschl, Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 17, 3295–3303, 2013 doi:10.5194/hess-17-3295-2013, © Author(s) 2013. CC Attribution 3.0 License.
Abstract. Over history, humankind has tended to settle near streams Continue reading