One year later — riverbanks stable

ST. GEORGE — Property owners along the Virgin and Santa Clara rivers should breathe easier now that nearly a million tons of rock are providing a solid barrier against future flood damage.

"It has been a very interesting year for all of us. Lives were changed, the watershed was changed, our agency changed," said Sylvia Gillen, state conservationist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) in Salt Lake City. "It's a terrible thing to experience what residents of this community did a year ago. Nobody should have to experience it twice."

On Jan. 9, 2005, following days of rainfall over nearby mountain ranges, the first signs of imminent flooding were starting to appear throughout the southwest region of the state. Both the Santa Clara and Virgin rivers would surge out of their channels and eventually cause more than $180 million in damage to public and private property.

One life would be lost and dozens of families would be displaced after losing their homes to the raging red torrent that once was a trickling creek.

President Bush would eventually declare the region a disaster area, setting off a sequence of events that would merge federal dollars with state and local funds to help bring the county back to a near-normal state.

"This whole event really got up close and personal for me," said Washington County Commissioner Jim Eardley on Thursday before the start of a tour to see some of the repair work completed along the two rivers. "We've got a lot accomplished over the past year and we want to make sure we're never as vulnerable as we were before the floods came."

The three-hour tour, hosted by the NRCS and Washington County, was a victory tour, of sorts, for those who have worked so hard to accomplish what seemed to be the impossible little more than a year ago.

So far in the recovery effort, 900,000 tons of rock have been quarried, cleaned and positioned into massive walls of rock lining sections of the two riverbanks. A geotextile material helps filter water as it ebbs and flows past the sections, helping to keep silt and rock in their needed positions.

Massive amounts of silt and debris, including portions of broken homes, cottonwood trees, sewer lines, cars and other possessions, had to be removed from the river channels.

"The vast majority of the damage done during the flood was due to erosion," said Blake Walbeck, the emergency watershed protection on-site coordinator for the NRCS in St. George. "There was a tremendous amount of woody debris clogging the channel."