Texarkana OKs firm for creek-erosion fixes

TEXARKANA — A Little Rock firm will work to help repair and prevent erosion in Nix Creek.

The Texarkana Board of Directors agreed to a $648,000 contract with Kesser International for work that includes dredging accumulated sediment and shoring up the creek’s banks at spots where they have worn away.

The project will address an estimated 20% of the work needed to keep water flowing through the creek bed, and it will have very little effect on potential flooding of the kind seen by residents during heavy rain the past couple of years, Public Works Director Tyler Richards said last week.

The work will affect flooding “a very small bit,” he said. “It’s not going to be a noticeable difference. It is not going to decrease the floodplain whatsoever. Those areas that are in [the] floodplain, they’re still going to flood. There’s nothing that we can do to stop that. We are simply removing these large sediment deposits, trying to stabilize those banks.”

Water finds its way around sediment deposits caused by bank erosion, so they do not decrease the creek’s capacity enough to cause flooding, he said. Instead, the problem has been too much rain.

“We have just been extremely unfortunate in the last couple of years with some heavy, heavy rains. We had a 100-year storm last year, and this year we had a 50. That’s pretty much unheard of,” he said.

The ideal solution to the flooding problem is construction of water detention basins that would temporarily hold stormwater, preventing it from causing damage, but such projects require extensive excavation and cost $500,000 to $1 million each, Richards said.

“It would be better to address some of the tributaries, detention along some of the tributaries going into Nix Creek. I’ve got several locations where I would like to move detention ponds, and I want to start incorporating some of those projects into our budget. That is truly going to be the only thing that helps any flooding issues,” he said.