Flood Damage Sets School Construction Projects Back
By John Earp
Heavy rains brought flooding to Jal recently, damaging the high school track and forcing new plans to be made to mitigate future flooding through the stadium. Panther Stadium stands in a flood plain, directly adjoining the Hackberry Draw, which drains a huge portion of the area north of town, all the way to the intersection of Country Club Rd and Highway 18. Superintendent Brian Snider said the flooding damaged the Panther Stadium football field and the track, resulting in an almost $1,000,000 insurance claim.
Snider said the flood “pretty much destroyed the whole field.” As a result, other ongoing construction projects at the school have been delayed, including the elementary addition, the junior high addition, new bus barn, and indoor athletic facility. Lasco Construction, which has been doing excellent and diligent work on the school construction projects over the past several years, has had to prioritize the work on the football field and track following the flood damage. Snider says that he is also hoping to get the City of Jal as well as Lea County to help with the flood mitigation efforts north of Panther Stadium in Hackberry Draw. Snider says, “We’re all working together on a permanent solution for it, and you have to remember, all of this is just mitigation and not prevention completely because you can never tell Mother Nature that now, okay, now we’re ready, you can’t flood. Well, Mother Nature is going to come at you even harder. In other words, we’re mitigating, we’re reducing it. We’re not eliminating it. There’s no way, well, because we’re in a low spot. We’re in a flood zone, no matter what we do.”
Without these mitigation efforts being done, the future of the stadium and its insurability would be uncertain. Snider says there is no way to guarantee that the mitigation efforts would totally prevent future flood damage to the stadium, field, or track, but that the school is working to develop a new flood plain study as well as working with architects to form a plan that would most effectively mitigate flood damage in the future. Another aspect of the flood mitigation issue is the impact on the neighborhood immediately south of the stadium, which includes Chester and 1st Streets especially. Snider said they are planning to put up a dam or wall north of the field, which would serve to catch mud and debris that might be pushed down the draw by flooding, as well as a cistern and a leach field as a means to mitigate any future flooding to the south of the stadium. He said, “We’re trying to be community conscious, too, you know?”
Snider says completion of the new track will have to wait until after the football season, since the priority is to get the football field redone. About the track, he said, “We just won’t have the top layer done [until after football season].”
Regarding the unfortunate delays to the numerous ongoing construction projects underway in the school district, Snider says, “We just want everything done that we’ve started, but we don’t want to create retirement jobs for the construction group. Let’s get it done.”
