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ST. GEORGE — Workers have dug thousands of meters of storm drainage ditches around the community of Dammeron Valley in an effort to stop another flash flood from ravaging the community.
Many of the plans for the drainage ditches required the county to obtain about 15 easements from landowners in Dammeron Valley, including four that were approved by the Washington County Commission Tuesday.
While the current effort in digging the ditches will not be enough to prevent flooding from a storm the size of the one in July that affected 200 homes in the area, it is a good start, county engineer Todd Edwards told St. George News.
Getting the easements from landowners without needing to pay any of them has been one of the biggest reasons the county has been able to move forward with the flood prevention project smoothly, Edwards said.
“These easements will allow us to go in and put in drainages in case we have another storm like the one we had this past summer,” commissioner Dean Cox said in Tuesday’s County Commission meeting. “Hopefully the water will be able to run somewhere.”
Edwards estimated the length of the ditches to be nearly a mile long since they started the project in August. Of the $100,000 allotted to the project from the county, “we’ve used about half of that,” he said.
The county is hoping to receive additional funding from the Natural Resources Conservation Service, which is a program run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture that can provide financial assistance for projects to reduce flooding around the nation. Once funding from the NRCS comes to the county, Edwards said he hopes to start construction on four detention basins on the east side of the community to hold water coming down from the mountains. The detention basins are estimated to cost between $500,000 and $1 million each.
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