Clay Sellers: Got questions about the Brazos, no more unknowns. Ever wonder where that water comes from or where it goes? We're Unpacking the Brazos River.
Charlie Shugart: Welcome to the BRA podcast, Unpacking the Brazos River. I'm Charlie Shugart, and I'm with our public information office, and I've got a little story. So, I grew up just outside the Brazos River Basin in what, as an adult, I now know is the Trinity River Basin. In May 1989, between eight and thirteen inches of rain fell across my city within fifteen hours, causing major flooding and, at the time, water to flow over Lake Arlington's emergency spillway for the first time. Emergency shelters opened, schools were closed, and the community came together to help flood victims.
Several feet of water filled our home. We didn't live by a river or a lake, but by a tiny creek that ran behind our house. And everyone said flooding like that would never happen again. And then it did. And while my parents are not around to fill in the very large gaps in my memory of our home flooding, not once, but twice, I can still feel several strong emotions from that time.
The fear that radiated from my mother as we watched the water rise on the slope of our backyard, inching toward our house. Everyone telling her that the water would never actually get inside. She later told me that her mother had told her to put all the important paperwork and photos on top of our fridge. She didn’t guess, of course, that the water would come in high enough to lift and tip the fridge, destroying everything she'd tried to save. There are, of course, memories of things that were important to me as a small kid.
A bunch of my stuffed animals were too water-damaged to save. Our bathroom, which had been carefully decorated and curated with all things penguins, that my mom loved so much, was ruined, and she was just so sad about it. Our four giant Oscars (fish) that we had had for years disappeared into the floodwaters, never to be seen again. Riding on someone's shoulders as they took me through the water-damaged house because I was insistent on seeing it, and we were very, very lucky compared to a lot of families in the community, and very fortunate on how we came out of that. That feeling of it would never happen to me is one I come across so often.
We don't prepare for emergencies because we think it won't be me. The percentage is too low. The occurrence is not frequent enough. So, we don't prepare. We hope for the best, which is kind of silly when there are some actionable things you can do to stay safe.
It's not just flood risks that are important to prepare for, and I have some awesome people here with me today who are going to help give you some actual items to help set you up for success. Dedrick Page is the BRA safety trainer. Thank you for joining us today.
Dedrick Page: Thanks for having me.
Charlie Shugart: So, since this is your first time on the podcast, why don't you tell us a little bit about your history with the BRA?
Dedrick Page: So, I am going on year three within the BRA, and my job is basically to go all the way around and train our employees on, you know, proper safety, chemical handling, things of that nature, just to make sure that all of our employees stay safe.
Charlie Shugart: Yeah. Absolutely. We love that. And we have a big basin and a lot of places to travel for you to be able to do that.
Dedrick Page: Yeah. It's always on the road.
Charlie Shugart: Also joining us is Donnie Naylor. Donnie, tell us a little bit about your history with the BRA and kind of what your role is.
Donnie Naylor: I started in 2007, primarily doing just waste management, and through the years, have progressed into the role of emergency management. And BRA, as you said earlier, is a very large basin. We have roughly 74 counties in the basin, and with three reservoirs, a series of water and wastewater plants that we either own or operate, there's a lot of need for us to be engaged with local emergency management, county emergency management, state assistance programs, state agencies, and regulatory authorities. So, there's a lot going on inside BRA in our efforts to work with those entities as well.
Charlie Shugart: With a basin as big as that, you have to stay pretty busy.
Donnie Naylor: Mhmm. Sure do.
Charlie Shugart: Well, we are also lucky to have someone joining us from Waco-McLennan County, Ryan Dirker. Thanks for coming and joining us today.
Ryan Dirker: Of course. Thank you all for having me.
Charlie Shugart: Tell us a little bit about what you do and what your role is.
Ryan Dirker: So, I serve as the emergency management coordinator for the City of Waco and McLennan County, and you did hear that correctly. We serve both. It is uncommon, I think, in the state nowadays, more so than it used to be, but we do serve both the residents of the City of Waco as well as the unincorporated parts of McLennan County. Now in practice, the other incorporated cities are very good partners of ours, and we are going to be there to support them through their disasters and their crises as they occur, but we are prepared to do whatever we need to for them as well. So, in practice, if you live in McLennan County, whether it is incorporated or unincorporated, we are here to serve you.
Charlie Shugart: Okay. Yeah. Great. You have a lot also that falls under your area that you get to do. We're very lucky Ryan is going to walk us through some great information today, so I'm glad everybody's going to be here to listen, and I'll just let you kick it off.
Ryan Dirker: Alright. Well, thank you. So, kick off a little bit about our staff. We've got a great staff at OEM. Myself, I'm in, I believe now, year 13 of my career.
I've done a number of different things. I started my career interning in the safety and security office of the Fort Worth Independent School District, and since then, I've gone on to other things. I worked for a company that helped to clean up railroad accidents for a short time.
Charlie Shugart: That's interesting.
Ryan Dirker: It was. It was my only experience in the private sector, but it helped with a kind of understanding of that world later on. I worked for a health and regional planning organization, the regional advisory council, in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. The largest event we dealt with there was when the Ebola outbreak happened.
They were in the metroplex, so we had a front row seat to that. From there, I went on to the state's emergency management agency, the Texas Department Division of Emergency Management, where I was a technical operations officer in the state operations center. And so, what that means is I pushed the buttons on daily operations. In between, when the SOC is activated, there is a number of staff members that are down there monitoring the state for threats, communicating with their district staff, those sorts of things. So, I was there for a little under five years.
The culmination of that was I was on duty the night Hurricane Harvey made landfall, and that's been one of the most impactful things I've done in my career. I remember very, very thoroughly and very vividly the city of Houston's 911 system crashing because it was overwhelmed. And somehow, our number got out to the populace. We only had so many phone lines. We're not designed to take in that many numbers of phone calls, and so the system would just dump, and it just dumped and dumped and dumped.
And we tried the best we could, and it was stressful because you would get people calling in and saying, I'm in my attic, and the water is coming up. Help me.
Charlie Shugart: Oh, wow.
Ryan Dirker: It speaks to public education. That's not what you need to be doing in a flood. Unless you have an axe in your attic and there's some way for you to get onto your roof, there's nowhere to go. You've put yourself in a bad situation.
Now, thankfully, we were able to pass that information out to Texas Task Force One, who was still flying helicopters at the time, and was able to save most, if not all, of those people. So that was heartening. And from there, I had opportunity to come here to the City of Waco-McLennan County. For three years, I served as the assistant emergency management coordinator before taking the EMC role in 2023.
And ever since then, we've been building a strong team to serve. My deputy emergency manager is a gentleman by the name of Tim Jeske. A lot of really great experience. He's super smart and talented and has endless energy and is passionate about serving the people that we serve. And so, I'm very grateful for our team.
Charlie Shugart: Yeah. That's wonderful. And I know, you know, we mentioned you're with Waco-McLean County, but the information that you're going to be sharing today, I mean, this applies to everybody across all regions. It's information that everybody's going to be able to take home and to their families and everyone to learn from.
Ryan Dirker: Yeah. It does. And so, what I normally do is I want to start, you know, by talking to everybody about what emergency management is, because you hear the terms, and obviously, you understand the words. And there's a tagline definition, you know, that we exist to serve the citizens by coordinating programs to prevent, prepare for, respond to, and recover from emergencies and disasters. But what that means is we're essentially all things to all people all the time.
We try really hard to do that. Yes. We have a particular role in emergencies, but we want to be gap fillers. We want to be coordinators. No job is too big.
No job is too small. If it exists and it needs to be there to serve people, that's what we're going to do because at the end of the day, we're in the people business. That's what matters first and foremost. People are always surprised to think that, like, I've never heard of your office. You must be somewhat new.
No. Not at all. We've been doing this for a very long time. As a matter of fact, our office was formed as the Waco-McLennan County Civil Defense Office back in the mid-sixties. A gentleman named Rufus Cleghorn was the first director, and of course, that was back when we were dealing with nuclear stuff with the Soviets and everything like that.
He's a fascinating man. In and of himself, we did some research on him. He was a World War II vet. He was an officer, retired major in the US Army, who came in and served as the first director from the mid-sixties all the way till 1980 before retiring and eventually passing away in early 2000. He was a remarkable man. There are clippings from newspapers about doing disaster drills and tornado exercises over at the old Lake Air Mall, all the way back from 1967.
So, I say that to illustrate the fact that this is not new. We've been doing this for a very long time. It's just within the post 9/11 world, I think, that what we have done in the dark has come out into the light. Because it used to be that you only interacted with us if you were having the worst day of your life. And in a lot of cases, that still may be true, and we want to be cognizant of that.
But at the same time, we want to be out front doing education. We want to be out front meeting our neighbors. I don't want the first time you ever see my face to be when everything has fallen apart, and you don't know me. We need to be able to build that trust in our community, so that's important to do for us.
Charlie Shugart: Yeah. Absolutely.
Ryan Dirker: And preparedness matters, you know, for a number of different things. I think mostly here in this area, people think of weather, and they're quite right. We have a number of weather issues that would affect our county, and I'd be interested in, you and the rest of the group. What do you think are some of those top those top hazards that we face?
Dedrick Page: Tornado.
Donnie Naylor: With all the industry that we have on-site, chemical exposure.
Ryan Dirker: Yeah. And all those are some cases. So, I mean, natural hazards, we run the gamut. Tornadoes, flooding, wildfires, winter storms, extreme heat, severe thunderstorms. Severe thunderstorms can cause just as much damage as tornadoes, but people sometimes think that because there's not a siren or a spinning cloud, then I'm not going to get hurt, and that's not the case.
Texas, more than any other state in the union, I'd venture to guess, has more severe thunderstorms. Maybe our friends in Oklahoma come close, but I think by strict numbers. You know, we here in McLennan County are right in Tornado Alley as those things happen. You'd be interested to learn, though, that scientists are starting to think that Tornado Alley may be shifting to the east a little bit.
Charlie Shugart: Oh, wow.
Ryan Dirker: Based on data we've gotten over the last five to ten years, the heat map, if you will, with all of the recorded tornadoes have started to move a little bit away from us. We don't know if it's a temporary thing or if it's just an unorthodox correlation. And so, as you know, tornadoes work off of what's called the Enhanced Fujita Scale, and it's how we communicate the severity of tornadoes, and it's based …
Charlie Shugart: Say it again.
Ryan Dirker: The Enhanced Fujita Scale. Ted Fujita was a scientist at the University of Chicago. Actually, a fun thing about him, the city in which he lived in Japan was the original target of the second atomic bomb. But the day that the mission was launched, it was cloud cover, and so they switched to Nagasaki. So had they dropped that original bomb, one of the most talented climate scientists who has ever existed would have died as a young man.
But as it were, he came to the United States and working at the University of Chicago for several years, came up with the original when you heard E something or I'm sorry, F something. It's the Fujita Scale. Doctor Fujita died in 1999, and in 2006, the scientific community got together and redid the scale to better classify kind of what they were seeing. So now you will hear EF, the Enhanced Fujita Scale, and how it goes from zero to five rather than one through five.
Charlie Shugart: Oh, interesting.
Ryan Dirker: And it's important to think, even if your tornado is an EF 0, that's 65 to 85 miles an hour. That is no joke. That can still cause damage, and it does. I saw an EF 0 here in China Spring two years ago take a piece of fence and impale it into the side of a house about six inches deep. So, a tornado of any sort
Charlie Shugart: Has an impact.
Ryan Dirker: It does.
Charlie Shugart: Makes a difference.
Ryan Dirker: It absolutely does. And so, we want to make sure that the public understands the differences between watches and warnings. This goes for tornado, but really anything, any sort of watch and warning. A watch means conditions are favorable for formation. So, that is the stage in which you are to be making your plans of what you're going to do about it.
That's the stage when you have to start getting ready to shelter, figuring out where your family members are, finding the best place in your house. It's during that stage. You catch a tornado warning.
That means there is a tornado present or is about to form. If you are waiting until a warning to make your plans, you have waited too long. It is too late. We want to encourage people to take action when we're under watch, and then when we're under warning, take shelter immediately.
Charlie Shugart: I know a lot of people who have a hard time remembering the difference between watch and warning. Do you have any good examples of … I'm jumping ahead, aren't I? You have an idea.
Ryan Dirker: No. That was very nice, I'm so glad you said it. Yeah. Because the best way that I've always thought about this, you think about we're making tacos.
A taco watch. We have all of your ingredients. You have your beef and your chilies and your tomatoes and your onions and all the things you put in the taco, but it's just on the table. That's your taco watch.
Taco warning. You've got a taco in your hand. It is together, and we're ready to do this thing. Ingredients versus all the ingredients have combined, and so that's a different way to look through it.
Charlie Shugart: I love that.
Ryan Dirker: So, I had asked the group since, you know, we're focusing on tornadoes because, you know, not only here in Central Texas, but I think in our popular culture, it's the storm that most people think of when it comes to their mind. What has been the most powerful tornado that's ever hit the city of Waco?
Donnie Naylor: I guess the ‘53.
Ryan Dirker: Absolutely. Yeah. A couple of days before Mother's Day in 1953, an F5 tornado, even now reclassified, would have been an EF tornado. Sorry. It was the day after Mother's Day at 4 p.m.
And in my estimate, and I could give a larger presentation on this because I really feel strongly about it, I think that the ‘53 tornado forever and irreparably changed the development of the city of Waco in ways that I think we're still trying to struggle to deal with today. It was that impactful. To this day, it remains the most damaging tornado in the state of Texas history.
Charlie Shugart: I did not know that.
Ryan Dirker: It was nearly a third of a mile wide. It killed 114 people, most of them downtown, most of them in one building. When the RT Dennis Building collapsed in on itself downtown, there's little whirlybirds in a parking lot near the Alaco Building, that's where it once stood, destroyed 600 homes and other buildings, over a thousand buildings, 2,000 vehicles.
Charlie Shugart: Oh, gosh.
Ryan Dirker: It actually started in Lorena. It made its way through.
It hadn't quite come down yet, but it was bouncing. And then it came down here. The thing that people may not know about the ’53 tornado is that at the same time, there were a couple of grad students at Texas A&M University. They were World War II fighter pilots, and they were getting their doctorates on the GI bill, and they were dealing with aircraft radar. And they're bouncing things up into the cloud, and they got a return back that really confused them.
And so, they sat down. They talked about it. Well, they figured out that if you shoot high-intensity radar beams into clouds, you get a return from the water droplets in the clouds. This is the basis and the formation of the weather radar that every single person depends on.
Charlie Shugart: That's incredible.
Ryan Dirker: Now, any tornado is dangerous, especially those big ones. So, when you're dealing with tornadoes and sheltering, the name of the game is to try to give yourself the best chance of survival. And so, what you're going to want to do is get as low as you can in the building and in the center of the building. I was a little kid in the Chicago area, and in the Midwest, everyone has basements.
Charlie Shugart: Oh, yeah.
Ryan Dirker: Here in the state of Texas, nobody has basements, and that's because of our soil. You can't. So, one of the things that our office also does is, the Waco Office of Emergency Management monitors, operates, and maintains the city of Waco's outdoor warning siren system, which is a 34-siren system in Waco with other sirens in Lacey Lakeview, Bellmead, Beverly Hills. Several other municipalities have their own sirens, our core system, we operate and run.
If you live here in the city of Waco, you'll hear from us on the first Friday of every month at 10 a.m. Here at the BRA, I'm sure you always hear from us as we are right next door.
Charlie Shugart: Yeah. It's very close.
Ryan Dirker: But, you know, if you ever don't hear that, I'd like you to call me. We can get that fixed. But we do that, assuming that the weather's nice because we're not in the business of panicking people. We don't want people to be afraid, but we do want people to be prepared. I'd be interested if anybody else knows this or not. Are the tornado sirens meant to be heard indoors?
Dedrick Page: Sure.
Charlie Shugart: Yes?
Ryan Dirker: Actually, these sirens are not tornado sirens. Technically speaking, they are outdoor warning sirens. And this sounds like semantics, but it's really not. They are not meant to be heard indoors.
Charlie Shugart: Oh. Okay
Ryan Dirker: If you can hear them indoors, so much the better. You're ahead of the game. But they were invented in a time when more people spent more time outdoors than they do today.
Donnie Naylor: Wow.
Ryan Dirker: So technically, and it's not a gotcha question. No one knows.
Charlie Shugart: Right.
Ryan Dirker: Houses are being built better than they used to, with better insulation than they used to. They're designed now to keep road noise out of your house. Well, it works both ways.
Charlie Shugart: Alright. That makes sense.
Ryan Dirker: So, in our business, we want to say that emergency alerting is a layer cake, and we want to have different layers of alerting. And the way we do that is the sirens are our first and obvious one because in our culture, everyone knows what that siren means.
Charlie Shugart: Right.
Ryan Dirker: But if you can't hear your siren or you happen to be somewhere where it's not in its sounding distance out in the county, per se, how do we get a hold of you? How do we reach you? We do that via our reverse 911 system called Everbridge. And we have a sign-up link if you go to alert Waco or alert McLennan, depending on if you live in the city or in the county, from there, you can sign up for the emergency alert. But we can send things to your phone for all of these severe weather warnings. We want to make sure that you're maximally prepared.
Charlie Shugart: Right.
Ryan Dirker: This was illustrated to us in the Hill Country floods. Now, this is a black swan event. Were there failures? Yes. Yes, there were. But does that mean that there's nothing we can do about it? No. It doesn't. Sometimes, the worst situations come together, and it creates a terrible situation, which is what happened down there. But we want to make sure, even if I have to tell you and you get eight different alerts, I'm sorry about that, but you were alerted.
Charlie Shugart: Right.
Ryan Dirker: I'd rather you complain to me that I've over-alerted you than have to hear that we lost you in the storm.
Charlie Shugart: Right. Absolutely.
Ryan Dirker: So, I take that personally. I don't want my neighbors to die. We then talk about flooding, which is, you know, very important to the work you do here at the BRA. And we always show these several slides of old, they are old Fred Gildersleeve slides from the early nineteen hundreds, that show the flooding primarily in East Waco.
Every ten years, the Brazos would catastrophically flood like clockwork. And then we found this cool graph that correlated all of the severe floods or the crests of the river. And you're looking at crests in the river between thirty and forty feet almost every year until about 1957.
Charlie Shugart: And what happened in 1957?
Ryan Dirker: They built the Lake Whitney Dam. The Brazos just doesn't exist here. It's a chain that goes all the way up, and these dams that you see, I find them very interesting because essentially, it's a conveyor belt that moves that water down to the Gulf of Mexico. What happens in Lake Whitney absolutely affects what happens here. If we lose the dam at Lake Whitney, we have 24 hours to figure out what we're going to do about it before dozens of feet of water hit us.
And so that Lake Whitney Dam is actually the first defense line to the city of Waco, making sure that the Brazos doesn't flood anymore. Several years later, they built the Lake Waco Dam, and that's the primary drinking water source for the city of Waco. It's also the second line of defense against river floods. Working in concert, these dams do more than give us drinking water, which is incredibly important to do, and also allow all the recreation on the lakes. They're actually the lines of defense from flooding here in the area so people can live here and can work here, and we can grow as a community.
So, while they're not, I guess, some of your dams, they do function the same things as PK and others.
Charlie Shugart: Lake Whitney plays a role in the BRA's water supply system as a whole in terms of getting water to people who need water. While BRA reservoirs don't serve a flood control capacity. We do work with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers reservoirs as a system to get people water.
Ryan Dirker: Oh. Very good. Well, you learn something new every day. Something that's interesting about flooding, whether it's river flooding or especially over the water or over the road flooding, 12 inches of fast-moving water can carry a small car away. Six inches of fast-moving water can knock over a full-grown adult. 18 to 24 inches of fast-moving water can take away SUVs and trucks.
Charlie Shugart: That's so scary because a lot of times you see people flying down roads where you can see water standing.
Ryan Dirker: “Turn around, don't drown” is one of the best-named pitch lines that we've come up with in recent memory. If you cannot see the bottom of moving water, do not attempt it. I understand it's inconvenient. I understand it may take more time, but it's not worth your life.
Charlie Shugart: Absolutely.
Ryan Dirker: And it happens every year. It breaks my heart to see it wherever it is. So, we want to make sure that people realize that if you cannot see the bottom of moving water, please do not attempt to drive through it. So other severe storm information that we talk about, that's something that is really quite interesting, if you see lightning or hear thunder, it is time to go inside.
If you are close enough to see lightning, you are close enough to be struck by it.
Charlie Shugart: Wow.
Ryan Dirker: Clouds can stretch over 10 miles sometimes. And so, remember, lightning is nothing more than charged particles discharging from those clouds.
On sunny days, when you see the happy clouds, you know, the new the cumulus clouds that are up in the sky, the big puffy happy clouds.
Charlie Shugart: Well, that's what I'm going to refer to them as now forever.
Ryan Dirker: You see how big some of those can be. Well, the nimbus clouds, that are their very terrible cousins are all the same way, and those can come down just about anywhere. So, you need to stay weather-aware. Pay attention to the news media. Sign up for our reverse 911 system several times.
Do both. Do everything. Do as much as you can. If you do get caught in a hailstorm, stay where you are as long as it's indoors. Don't try to say, “But I'm in my car, and I can see my front door. I can see it. It's right there. I can make it.” No. You can't.
These hailstones fall at about 212 miles an hour. And of course, the bigger they are, the heavier they are, meaning the faster they fall. Even the little ones can kill you. So that goes into one of the things that we're trying to that we well, not trying, we are starting here at OEM was a program called Do One Thing.
And what Do One Thing is that we tell members of the public that we understand that sometimes disaster preparation can be esoteric. Sometimes, there are a lot of things that you go to the FEMA website, and our friends at FEMA will give you a laundry list of things to do, and they're all very important. But it can seem like a bit much.
It can seem overwhelming. So, we want to encourage people to do one thing, meaning taking small steps that make a difference. Maybe if you were worried about having to be in your house for long periods of time, get an extra case of water each time you go to the grocery store, rather than panic buying at the point of a problem. This way, we don't run out of things. You get things one at a time.
That way, you're prepared for it to happen. No more panic buying.
Charlie Shugart: I love that. Because it does sometimes when you think about the things that you want to do and you want to make sure you're prepared for all the scenarios out there, it can feel daunting when you're maybe starting out, or you're wanting to find a place to begin.
Ryan Dirker: Indeed. During stressful times in our lives, we don't often make good decisions. And when you hear the siren going off, that's a bad time to start thinking, where are my supplies? Where's my family? Are we in the proper place?
Have we made evacuation routes? That's a bad time to do that planning. So, by doing that ahead of time, you can be prepared to make better decisions, unfortunately, should that happen. And so, to help you choose one thing, you can learn about what disasters and what incidents occur in your area, because everything's different. We have tornadic activity here in McLennan County, and we do have flooding, but we don't have flooding like our friends in New Braunfels.
Charlie Shugart: Sure
Ryan Dirker: A couple of inches of rainwater in New Braunfels can flood the whole place. So, no matter where you live and no matter where you're listening to this from, there are individual issues in your own communities that affect you more than others, and it's important that you know them because you know your community the best. So, there's a couple of things you can do. Let me talk about Do One Thing. Maybe that one thing is to learn what disasters can happen in your area and what you'll do with them.
You know, what can happen here? What could happen to my neighborhood? What could happen to my neighbors? And then what to do about that? Do I live near an industrial park? Do I live near a river, lake, or ocean? You'd be surprised that the most flood-risk body of water in Waco is not the river. It's not the Brazos River. It's Waco Creek.
Charlie Shugart: Really?
Ryan Dirker: There are pictures from a Waco Creek flood in the late eighties near Baylor, not on campus, but near there, of Waco Fire Departments in boats rowing themselves down flooded streets, and Waco Creek runs through those neighborhoods.
Charlie Shugart: Interesting.
Ryan Dirker: And remember with floodwaters, it's not about how much falls, but more importantly, how fast and where. When you hear that there's been an inch of rain, that doesn't mean that an inch of water has fallen. That means an inch has fallen where I'm sitting and where Donnie's sitting and where you are sitting, where we're all sitting.
Charlie Shugart: Right.
Ryan Dirker: And it compounds and it rises quick. I don't have the gallons that fell in the Hill Country, but it's enormous. And then during hurricane Harvey, they're 51 inches. And again, that's not 50 inches, that's 50 inches on all of the spots, not just one.
So that compounds very, very quickly. Do you live near railroad tracks? Every day, the railroad industry comes through communities, and you don't have any idea what's on it. Most folks don't. Why would you?
It's never happened until it does. Now, our friends in the railroad industry are safety-conscious for the most part, and they do a pretty good job of following federal regulations and doing their jobs and doing the things to keep communities safe, but it happens.
Charlie Shugart: Right.
Ryan Dirker: Also, do you live near a nuclear plant? Sometimes nuclear plants have issues. Am I saying they're unsafe? I'm not getting into that. But, you know, there is a hazard there.
And do you live near steep slopes? Rockslides happen all the time, especially when it gets really, really wet. Another option you can take is, you take steps now to prevent damage to your home - bracer strap your roof, reinforce entryways, reinforce doors, remove tree branches that could fall in your home, remove tree branches that can fall on power lines. That's a problem here in Waco. You know, they planted all those leafy neighborhoods in the nineteen forties, and now those little front yard trees are now 30 feet tall.
Charlie Shugart: Right.
Ryan Dirker: And you see them in any neighborhood in this city that was built before 1960. They're huge now, and they're up there and I mean, yeah, so that's really important for you to do. Secure outdoor furniture when a tornado watch is issued; that's incredibly important, and some people don't think about it because most of the time, tornado winds aren't the thing that kills people. Flying debris kills people because your lawn chairs turn into an 80-mile-an-hour missile, and you don't stand a chance against it.
Charlie Shugart: Yeah. No. Absolutely.
Ryan Dirker: So that's an easy thing you can do. I don't know what to do. I don't know where to start. When you're under tornado watch, bring in your outdoor furniture. That's what you can do.
That's where you could start. That's an easy one, and it really does matter.
Charlie Shugart: Yeah.
Ryan Dirker: And then consider adding a tornado safe room to your home. I remember my parents, they moved, and they built a big house that they've since moved from, but when they built it, they actually built it with, mostly for my mom, a big metal room that was in a closet in the house, and that's where they went during storms. They're up in the Texoma area and so they get hit by those sorts of things all the time. For things you can do to prevent from floods, elevate your home so the lowest floor is a foot or more above the base elevation. This happens out in the in the county in the Axtel area near some of these flood control dams that were put in, those earthen dams that were put in the forties and fifties, and they've elevated their homes. There are areas of South Waco that have done that because they're right on the river and flood all the time when the river comes up. You'd mentioned earlier that, unfortunately, you had lost all those things in your home, and I'm very sorry to hear that. That’s terrible. And so, you know more than any others. If you have an upstairs, put them upstairs. Put your valuables as high as they can, but then again, understand that sometimes, try as you may, you just lose sometimes.
Charlie Shugart: Yeah. Absolutely.
Ryan Dirker: That's one of the hardest things about my job, is that people go, well, you told me to prepare, or even in my own family, because we've suffered loss too, and you can prepare, but sometimes you just lose, and that's tough.
Charlie Shugart: Yeah.
Ryan Dinker: But that doesn't mean there's nothing you can do about it, so we try our best to make sure that doesn't happen. Using native plants for landscaping, reason being is because they're from here, and so they are used to our soil profile and also their job is to soak up water.
Charlie Shugart: Oh, okay.
Ryan Dirker: So, it helps with floods. If you have plants along defensible spaces in the front of your house, they'll soak up water and maybe, maybe help with floodwaters around your house.
Charlie Shugart: Well, I always needed an excuse to go and buy more plants.
Ryan Dirker: Everybody likes plants. For wildfires, the things that you can do, you can remove dead vegetation within 10 feet of your house and avoid placing firewood or propane tanks in that area. That's called defensible space. It's an area around your house that you sanitize and give the fire nothing to burn. I've pulled up on a massive wildfire one time. This was outside of Lorena. We knew this one was bad. We could see the smoke from about 10 miles off.
And we got there, and it's burning. It's torched the land. But these people had followed defensible spaces, and so we saw the burn profile, and it had just gone around at this person's house. Didn't touch it. It had more easy things to burn.
And so, the house was fine. That was one of the best examples of defensible space I've ever seen. Saved their house. Trim back trees that overhang your roof simply because, again, they burn, then they'll burn what it's touching. Prune trees to make sure that your branches are within six to 10 feet of the ground.
That way, because, again, if it starts to burn way up high and you can't reach it, the fire department can. But by that point, we're going to remember what I mentioned about those interior communities that have all those tall trees. If you just have your hose, you may not be able to hit that guy. And so, by the time a fire department can get there, even if it's three minutes, the fire could have spread. We're going to make sure that you have insurance.
That's always really important. That's probably the best thing you can do to protect yourself. Not all damage could be prevented, but having the right insurance is probably your best bet for getting your home back to normal quickly after a disaster. I have heard people, and it makes me sad to hear this, they'll go, well, I'll just apply to FEMA. FEMA will not make you whole.
Donnie Naylor: Yeah.
Ryan Dirker: I believe the most FEMA can give you is about $50-$60,000, somewhere in that range. It's less than $100,000. FEMA will not make you whole under any circumstance. And then option three, plan what to do if you have to evacuate.
We have to evacuate outside our house for things like fires and gas leaks, outside of my neighborhood for things like wildfires and gas main breaks, or outside of your community for hurricanes, hazardous material spills.
Charlie Shugart: What does that look like? Like, to plan to evacuate?
Ryan Dirker: So, talk with your family and decide that, hey, if we ever have to leave the house really fast, in the middle of the night, smoke alarm goes off, we see flames. We don't talk about it. We grab our crap, and we go across the street, and we have a place outside of the house. This is the rally point. That's outside of your house.
If, as happens quite frequently in Waco, there's a gas leak and the fire department goes and knocks on your door and says, " Hey, there's a gas leak out front. We need you out of here.” Where are you going to go? Two different ways. Where can you go on foot, and where can you go in your car?
I bring this up, for gas leaks because if the gas leak is large enough and the mixture is correct, your car engine can ignite that gas.
Donnie Naylor: Yeah.
Ryan Dirker: Have a plan to do both. Be able have a plan to leave your neighborhood by foot. Have a plan to leave your neighborhood by car, and where you could spend eight, twelve, ten, twenty-four hours if you needed to.
And then outside your community, the neighborhood gets flattened by a tornado. You live on the coast and cat five hurricane is on its way. You need to get out of Dodge for a couple of days. Make that plan of where you're going, where you're staying, and then pack things that you can just grab and go. Always a good idea to especially if you have little kids, to make a map of how to get outside of your house and then to practice this.
Know where all the exits are. Is a first story window an exit?
Dedrick Page: Could be.
Donnie Naylor: Yeah
Ryan Dirker: You betcha. I mean, anything that isn't a hazard to your health is an exit when you really need to get out. So, you make plans. Door won't open. Back door won't open. There's a perfectly good window right there. It's on the 1st floor. It won't hurt you. Go through that window. It gets you out. We had an exercise one time where we were over at one of the local hospitals, and it was an evacuation exercise from a tornado, and one of the charge nurses there didn't follow the plan per se, that she had gone out into the lobby, and she's looking around. Did I do it? You're out, aren't you? It wasn't the prescribed way, but it got the job done. And so that's what you can do also with your neighborhood. And so, all of these are just an option to that Do One Thing and to remember that you're really the only one that can protect your family in a disaster and doing one thing a month makes a huge difference. The police department, the fire department, EMS, and ambulance services…they're coming. You can count on that. However, in a community-wide disaster, there are a lot of problems and only a few of them. It might be a minute. The best thing you can do for yourself and for your family is to be prepared for these things to serve as stabilizing agents where you are. So, preparedness, to kind of sum all of this up, it goes back to that layer cake.
It's notification, it's education, and it's preplanning. And if you do all three of those things, you give yourself the best chance you can to effect positive change for yourself, your family, and your community in the event that incidents or hazards happen in your community.
Dedrick Page: Alright. So, Ryan and Donnie, since we are kind of in the safety field together, emergency management, and, you know, just me and my safety space, we kind of view the world a little different. Right? When Ryan was talking about the emergency action plan that you can have with your family, right, you know, my first thing to do is when I go into a hotel or restaurant, where are my exits at? Right? Where's my nearest fire extinguisher? Do they have AED? Right? That's some of the kind of things that, you know, people in the safety field kind of see the world a lot different than the average people who are just, you know.
Charlie Shugart: Yeah. I don't think I've ever walked into a restaurant and went, where is the next fire extinguisher at?
Dedrick Page: So that's kind of a thing. Right? Ryan, what are some things people should know and be aware about with our fire risks from, you know, decorations, heaters, and also, you know, since we're getting into those holiday seasons, fryers. Have you had any encounters with that?
Ryan Dirker: So, there's always good things to do when you have those surge protectors, those power strips. Don't overload those guys. I've been into houses where there was a fire, and I see over in the corner this power strip that's stacked on a second power strip that's stacked on a third power strip, and I thought to myself, I know why your house burned.
Charlie Shugart: I don't know if everybody knows. You just can't keep plugging them into each other.
Dedrick Page: People think it's a space to plug something in there. Right?
Charlie Shugart: Right. Yeah.
Ryan Dirker: So, with the fire extinguisher, and that's a really good point, one of the things and this goes into secondly, the city of Waco's fire protection team is fantastic, and we're really blessed to have them in this community. And one of the things I heard one of them teach in a class. I'm just sitting in the back of the room going, oh, I messed that up. Because you have a fire extinguisher. Right?
Where does everyone put their fire extinguisher?
Dedrick Page: So, it depends. Right? Some people just put them either outside the garage or under the cabinet in the kitchen.
Ryan Dirker: It's that second one, under the cabinet in the kitchen. Why do you do that? Because that's where the fire is.
Donnie Naylor: That's where the stove is.
Ryan Dirker: But what happens if it's already burning?
Donnie Naylor: Yeah. Exactly.
Ryan Dirker: You can't get to it. Put that guy in the laundry room. Put that guy someplace else where you can go get it where it's not in the most fire prone place in the world. So that's a great question.
Dedrick Page: And let people know where it's at. Like, you know, even when people put it under the cabinet, like, just say under the sink. Well, you’ve got to think about what's around it. It's other household items, so it may get pushed to the back.
Charlie Shugart: Making it harder to reach for and more difficult to get to.
Dedrick Page: Yeah. Most of our extinguishers, if you notice around the building, are propped up.
Charlie Shugart: Yeah. Right out in the open.
Dedrick Page: Alrighty. So, here's another one, and this can go for the BRA emergency and Waco. What are some of our good advice that we can have with staying safe within our freezing conditions? And that's having our employees on the road and are working around that, and then it comes from the public as well. Like, what can we do to make sure that we give people great advice to, hey, we're having the freeze coming up or there is cold weather surrounding us. What can we do?
Donnie Naylor: I think that one of the things you just led into is that education component, but that upfront, that preparedness and notice upfront, because you're right. There are those of us who work in this environment. We think totally different, and it's not to discredit the common public. If you get a mother out in the park, the first thing she's going to think of if bad weather approaches is her children. That's the first thing she's going to, you know, think about first.
It's not how do I get from point A to point B. The things that we're accustomed to preparing for, a lot of times, people don't think about. So, I think it's the education component, and it's making those plans. And then it’s, more importantly to me, it's practicing those plans, getting people to practice those plans, because maybe you realize after you have practiced something, you need to change it. There are some things you need to change to put into place because perhaps many things have changed.
Maybe there's been another brother or sister. There's, you know, mom's thinking about more than just, you know, one sibling now. Maybe you've had an add-on to the house, you know, but has anybody actually practiced that fire escape plan or anything like that? And that's one of the things that we do in our emergency action plans at our reservoirs and our water and wastewater facilities is we do an annual review.
And then we do tabletop exercises every five years or more, if need be, you know, to make sure that we not only have the plan in place, but we know how to operate within those plans, you know, guidelines. That's why I enjoy working with Waco-McLennan Counties. BRA itself doesn't have any assets, I don't want to say make it sound less, but the assets that we have here are Central Office, you know, our new laboratory. But when it comes down to it, what BRA may see as a priority if we have an asset that's potentially at loss is not necessarily the priorities that that man's got at the other end of the table. He's having to deal with something on a much larger scale. That's where we have to make sure that we are communicating because, yeah, we might have something dealing with at our facility itself, and I can give you a prime example. We had a fire up in front of Central Office. And, yeah, it was a fire. It was a heating element that hadn't been cleaned, and it started up. Fire alarms went off. Everybody responded. But the problem was that fire department right here was out on another call that had a much bigger part. Everybody thought, well, they're right here. No. That's not the priority for those people. It was a major priority to BRA.
Charlie Shugart: Right. Right.
Donnie Naylor: Parking lot goes, where's the red lights? They should have come from right now. That unit was out on another call somewhere, and we got a call. They got here quick. They went in. Everything was taken care of. But BRA has to understand, and we try to educate our coworkers that what we see as an immediate priority for BRA is not always a priority for the customer that we serve.
Ryan Dirker: However, sometimes it is.
Donnie Naylor: Yeah. Sometimes it
Ryan Dirker: I remember very well. Actually, remember earlier, I referenced that fire about that house of defensible spaces. So, on that fire, that very same fire, I'm on my way to the fire, and I actually get a call from Donnie, and he says, "Hey, did anyone clear the lake before those planes air-dropped?” Nope. Completely forgot about it. So, what you do does matter to us sometimes because we work together. At the beginning of my presentation, I talked about the members of our office. There are two of us. There are 260,000 people in this county. We need the help from all of our partners.
Everyone has a role to play. Everyone has a role to play, and all of those roles are important. But to answer your question about cold weather, from our perspective and in your home, we're going to start from the outside in. We're going to make sure that you have maximum insulation. We're going to make sure that you have closed off your windows.
The Electricity Reliability Council of Texas, our friends at ERCOT, have a free, open-to-the-public view of what's going on with the electrical grid. It's always a good thing to look at every now and then. During cold weather days, I look at it four times a day.
Charlie Shugart: That's online?
Ryan Dirker: It is. Just to make sure that supply and demand is at a healthy rate. They seem to have learned their lesson. I noticed now, they keep more load on the grid just as a matter of course than they used to prewinter storm Uri.
Donnie Naylor: Mhmm.
Ryan Dirker: But something from emergency management and from the fire department that I would like everyone listening to this to know, if we lose power and it is cold, please, please, please, please, please do not run gas-powered generators in your home. Please.
Charlie Shugart: Explain why.
Ryan Dirker: Because they off-gas CO2, and that's an asphyxiant, and you will die in your house, and people do, and it breaks my heart. Again, I don't want to bury… And I don't mean to be overly dramatic about it, but I don't want to bury any of our brothers and sisters here because they did something they just didn't know about. So cold weather is a challenge, But, yeah, if you build as many defense as you can against the cold and also have a plan of if your home is too cold, where are going to go? At the city, we try to maintain cold weather shelters when they meet a certain threshold that may be for you, it may not, but also, I guess it depends on if the community still has power or not because things could be rough in your house, but hopefully somebody you know they're doing better, or if it needs to be, and I've done this before as a as a younger man.
We lost power, and it was cold, and I went to the mall, and I hung out at the mall for, like, half the day. But it was warm at the mall. So, when you're dealing with cold weather, that's probably your best bet.
Donnie Naylor: Yeah. You know, BRA is unique, and I say not BRA exclusive. River authorities, for example. River authorities, water distros, are unique in that we are not considered members of the governor's division of emergency management, emergency council. That means we are not a regulator.
Though we do abide by the government code 418.1 of the Texas government code, we are not one of those members. And so that man sitting at the other end of the table has a much bigger responsibility in protecting the public that you just heard him talk about, the hundreds of thousands of people. And though BRA has responsibility in notifying those counties that are below or in some cases even above some of our assets, our lakes that he was talking about before. It's imperative that we notify those counties above, around, and below our lakes to make sure that when we are coordinating with our water services department, National Weather Service, and West Gulf River Forecast, who are the subject matter experts, they find conditions that are favorable. In most cases, it's flooding, we make sure that we have the capability in a mass notification system to get that information out to them as quick as possible. Again, one of the things that a lot of people don't understand is we have a reservoir, and we are having to make releases because BRA has a responsibility of protecting its critical infrastructure. So, unfortunately, there might be times when we have flooding already engaged downstream. If that critical infrastructure has a potential to fail, we have to make those releases. So, it's imperative that we let those counties, it doesn't matter whether it's immediately below the dam, it could be all the way to the coast.
If they are in our basin, then we need to make sure that they know because their priorities further down at the coast may be totally different than those counties right below.
Charlie Shugart: Yeah, absolutely. It's a big part of it is communication.
Donnie Naylor: It is. It is. And Ryan and I are used to that, if you're not sure, to pick up the phone and ask somebody.
Charlie Shugart: Yeah.
Donnie Naylor: And we do that routinely. Pick up the phone and ask somebody. We like to make sure I stay engaged with those counties below the dams, and I don't want to say just below the dams because those that are immediately around our lakes, those that are upstream. We don't know what those weather conditions are up there.
If we are having to make releases and these poor counties right below us are getting inundated with rainfall in there, yeah, they do need to know what's coming out of our dam, but they're also having to deal with what is on the ground at the time and what's moving into those smaller tributaries that are funneling into the main stem of the river. So those areas and those counties below a lot of our confluences, and I use Brazos County as a prime example, you may have releases that are taking place over in the Navasota. And we may have some conditions over there. But what a lot of people don't realize is if a front has moved in in the Bosque or in the main stem of the Brazos, the Army Corps of Engineers has the same obligation to protect their critical infrastructure as well.
And so now you've got a release going on in the main stem. You've got one going on over in the Navasota, and those poor counties down below are going get all of it. So, you've got to make sure you let them know. The other thing that we try to do is not to circumvent, but we like to help keep the disaster districts informed as well. Those counties that are working on their immediate concerns to protect the public maybe working on some things. What we try to do to minimize them having to “hey, by the way, BRA's got river releases going on”. We go ahead and put them in our mass notification because that's what they are using. If their assets are overwhelmed, they reach out to those disaster districts or to those regions for assistance. The quicker we can let them know what's going on, the quicker they can help these counties as well.
And so, it's a much quicker response. And I think Harvey was one of those times that was an education statewide. You know, you had a unique hurricane that came ashore. It went out, and then it came back in again. But when it came back in, with the same intensity and moved up in our basin, we were already in a situation where we were flooded.
You have to realize that Houston sits where you have river basins that all are coming into that same confluence area. So, they were already underwater, and yet as that thing moved after it set and kind of hovered over that and moved up, we started making gate releases out of the Navasota and the main stem because we had to protect our critical infrastructure. And so, what are we doing? We're moving floodwaters down into an area that's already inundated. And so that's what we do for BRA emergency management is communicate with those counties, those disaster districts, to let them know what is going on, where they can make the proper, you know, arrangements to protect, you know, public health and safety.
BRA is unique. There are eight regions for the division of emergency management. There are eight regions, and four of those regions touch our basin.
Charlie Shugart: Oh, okay. Wow.
Donnie Naylor: There are 25 disaster districts, eight of which touch our basin. And so, there are a number of people that we try to keep in the loop.
Charlie Shugart: Right. Absolutely.
Donnie Naylor: Anytime we have something ongoing, and we're fortunate enough to have the relationship that we have with the US Army Corps, which does an outstanding job, not just to talk to BRA, but the other 26 river authorities throughout the entire state. And so, it's really critical that communication is understood and that we can get that information out as quick as possible to help the local and county officials do their job to protect public health and safety.
Charlie Shugart: Yeah. That's a big role in trying to stay in regular conversation with everyone and stay up to date, and county leaders change, and people move on to different jobs, and just staying in touch with everybody. That's, I imagine, an ongoing and constant work that has to be done.
Donnie Naylor: Mhmm. We try to do emergency action plan reviews, like I said before, at least annually, but there are times when we've had turnovers at local level, at county level, where it's good to just sit and spend some face to face time, making sure that we understand that county or that city's probabilities, higher risks, as well as how we could affect that. Not that we intended to create any additional risk or exposure, but in the event, you know, that we have a better understanding of what their bigger concerns are of negatively impacting the public, the better we can understand what we need to do to try to help communicate with them as well. So, yeah, I enjoy doing this. I mean, we've got a great group of local and county emergency management officials I enjoy working with.
And it's not opposed to pick up the phone and call and say, hey, you know, what's going on down there?
And I kind of hope that they would do the same thing. If they've got some issues going on downstream, I hope that they know they can pick up the phone and ask questions. Hey, are y'all planning any gate releases? Because if you've got a county right below one of our lakes, it has a much quicker impact than you do a county that's
Charlie Shugart: Farther downstream.
Donnie Naylor: 17 miles downstream. The effects can be different.
Charlie Shugart: Well, you guys have provided a lot of wonderful and helpful information. Is there anything that we've left off that …
Ryan Dirker: I wanted to kind of close my piece of just kind of reiterating a couple of things. First and foremost, we at the Waco-McLennan County Office of Emergency Management are very appreciative of our partnership with the BRA and the things that you do for us. And I have no doubt that when the chips are down, even if it's outside of what you normally do, this building is filled with people with that know water, of hydrologists, and things that we may need to call on, and I have no doubt that even if it's technically not their job, they'd be here for us, and we appreciate that. And the last thing I want you to know is that if there's one message we could communicate to the public, the more you know, the better you do. So, stay educated, and that's the best way to keep yourself safe.
Donnie Naylor: That, and I would say, don't be afraid to the public. I would say don't be afraid to reach out to your local. Call us. It's not that we're going to try to have our own little sandbox, but we'll do everything we can to reach out to the other local and county officials to say, hey, we're getting this information. And we have, at times, presented things collectively, done presentations together, so that the public does understand how we communicate.
Charlie Shugart: Yeah. Absolutely. One of the things the BRA offers the public is called Speakers Bureau, and that is a free service that we offer where if you want somebody to come out and talk to you about, you know, flood awareness or flooding issues or what reservoirs we have, how that operates, any things like that, you know, we love to come out and educate. The more you know, the better prepared that you can be in any way that we can help educate on these different topics. I mean, we're here for it.
Alright. Ryan, Donnie, Dedrick, thank you guys so much for joining us today. I am so glad we were able to get everybody together to talk about this.
Donnie Naylor: Appreciate that.
Charlie Shugart: Yeah. Absolutely. Well, if you have a topic about the Brazos River, the basin, water supply, flood control, reach out. We'd love to hear about what it is that would be of interest to you. Or if you have any follow-up questions after listening to today's episode, email us at information@Brazos.org.
And with that, we're out. Thanks for listening to Unpacking the Brazos River.