KYTX

LONGVIEW (KYTX) – Many people in Gregg County are dealing with big messes and damage to their homes.However, one Longview woman believes the flooding near her home could have been avoided if the city had taken earlier action.

When Lydia Brown woke up Wednesday morning and realized just how much it had rained overnight, she said she went directly to her basement.

“I knew I needed to go down and check the basement and make sure it’s OK,” Brown said. “There was certainly water.”

Brown lives near Harris Creek, which flooded and brought water into multiple nearby homes. Brown spent the next few days using a wet vac to suck up almost 1000 gallons of water, but she said she still lost plenty of valuable items.

“I had a lot of really expensive wood down there I was going to use for some reconstruction,” Brown said.

Brown, though, wasn’t able to use her wet vac right away, as it was in a shed in her backyard. When she first went outside after realizing she had water in her basement, Brown said there was three to four feet of water that had shifted her storage unit off the ground and at an angle.

“Unless I get a rowboat, I wasn’t about to come out here and grab my wet vac,” Brown said. “The storage unit had turned and should have been facing another way.”

This isn’t the first time Brown has dealt with flooding issues. For about seven years, Brown set up her shed almost level to the ground with no problems. Then, flooding caused her to put a cinder block under her storage unit.

“I jacked it up and put one underneath it to get it out of the way of the water,” Brown said.

However, it started flooding again soon after and forced her to add more cinder blocks and eventually, a set of small stairs.

“I really have made this my mission in life for the past two years to get rid of this issue that I’ve got going on,” Brown said. “I’ve spoken with some people in the city I know to try to fix the creek.”

Brown said there is an excess of dead branches and trees growing sideways into Harris Creek, which is right behind her house. This eventually caused it to flood.

“I have been studying the creek and walked up and down the entire thing,” Brown said. “When we have rushing water and the dirt erodes, those trees growing sideways are going to get snatched up by the rushing water. They’re going to get caught anywhere there’s a culvert going under a road, which is going to cause it to back up again.”

Longview City Spokesman Shawn Hara said the city’s public works department does handle these issues through natural state management.

“They’re pretty much going to leave a creek or a flood way in as natural state as possible while trying to remove debris,” Hara said. “Flood management is obviously something important for the city of Longview.”

Hara also said that Harris Creek is now on their radar.

“I’ve already reported that to our public works department and they’ll go out and take a look,” Hara said.

Brown said with the persisting issues she has had in the past and with the fact that each successive flooding problem was worse, she hopes it is a different story this time around.

“It’s somebody’s responsibility to keep the creek cleaned out,” Brown said. “With nothing done, I am feeling the repercussions of that.”