Travis County Commissioners Court
Tuesday, October 12, 2010,
Item 24
Item 24, receive status report from espey consultants on the multi phased clean up of hamilton creek and hamilton pool.
>> > good morning.
joe geiselman.
this morning we have a presentation on actually the status report and a presentation on the cleanup of hamilton creek and pool.
as you recall, well over a year ago we had an incident where there was significant runoff, storm water runoff from a development in hays county that polluted the creek and the pool.
as a result of that we filed some lawsuits and ended up getting a settlement that helped us finance the improvements that had to be undertaken.
we're on the verge of completing phase -- the first phase of that, which is the upper reaches of the creek, and we thought this would be a great opportunity to come back to the court and kind of let you know how it's going and also the launch into phase 2, which would be the remaining cleanup work including the hamilton pool within one of Travis County's parks.
so with that, I guess victoria.
>> sure.
victoria harken.
I put together a brief presentation of where we are right now.
we've been working hard at it and -- can you all see the presentation?
we'll go ahead and go.
basically the first video is I wanted to show you briefly real quickly what happened.
in may 2007 -- that's always the case.
give it just a seconds and we'll see if we can get it to work real quick.
okay.
good.
this is the video of pedernales river when Travis County was flying it in 2007.
what I want you to note is that picture where he see the different colored water coming out, the different colored water, that's hamilton creek.
so the Travis County was flying it for purposes of assessing the reimers property and noticed this very white color coming down the pedernales, much like a plume that you would see.
and the video continues to show the pedernales and we'll move to hamilton pool and they flew up hamilton creek and there is hamilton pool and you can see the massive amounts of cream colored water coming over the water fall at hamilton pool.
flying essentially the water, they flew back up to the property, ranches at hamilton pool and that is a huge development moving under construction.
you can see some equipment and you'll notice in these huge areas of construction on site controls are essentially silt fences.
what happened in may 2007 through August, September 2007 is that their on site controls essentially failed.
and you'll notice here at the top, this corner here, this is a huge pile of material they had brought in to do the roads.
and you'll notice around it is basically a silt fence.
so they had numerous and continuous and consecutive rains in may, June, July, August and September of '07 and massive amount of sediment laden storm water left the site and essentially went into the creeks.
so as a result, these are pictures of some of the inadequate storm water controls.
we'll see this later on.
notice it is an important area and we'll show later.
this picture is just a silt fence, an 8-foot culvert.
so on site essentially failed.
this is another picture of grand summit boulevard when it was under construction.
just imagine the amount of rain received in that period of time and all of this was exposed.
another picture, this is a silt fence that runs through here of a silt fence that was completely overwhelmed.
this is a picture of hamilton pool after the rainfall runoff event.
essentially a brown, very creamy, much like a latte type color.
since then, since October 2007, Travis County along with the state of Texas filed a suit against the developer and you can read there March of '09 the Travis County Commissioners court accepted settlement agreement with the developer and the engineer.
in December 2009 Travis County extended a contract for cleanup efforts.
in June I was given notice to proceed.
we started cleanup on July 6th.
this map is also provided for you on this easel.
what you are looking at is hamilton pool in the top left corner.
the main road that goes through the property is grand summit boulevard you'll see here.
and there's the -- the
>> [indiscernible] culverts so we are seeing -- I'll refer to them as culvert e, d and c.
this is hamilton pool road.
71 is over here.
essentially I wanted to give you some before and after pictures.
this is upstream culvert d.
this is upstream of culvert d approximately midway up.
and essentially what happened with culvert d, it was one of the initial points of entrance for the silt.
the
>> [indiscernible] they used in and around the property and when it crossed the creek so they lost that hard road a number of times.
it washed out into the creeks.
culvert d was one of our bigger sources of silt.
this is picture of a before and after taken in '07 and this is taken in July or August of this year.
this is also upstream of culvert d.
this is in November of '07 and you will see the mud start to accumulate.
this was in February of '08 where we had a big rainfall event.
notice on the edges that the mud has gotten very high.
this is in August of 2010 when we started to clean out.
it took us about six or seven days to finally get all the silt out of this hole.
and this is natural filled back up and we'll talk about that in a minute.
this is picture of that particular hole after we've cleaned it up.
again, more pictures.
this is an area of the creek facing south between the cleanup areas and this is that same area after they had cleaned it up.
this particular area
>> [indiscernible] this was prior to us cleaning up.
what you can see vegetation had already started to root.
you can also see it in the pictures.
this is during our cleanup just to give you how much mud was in the creek bed.
we used smaller equipment to remove some of the silt.
we used
>> [indiscernible] cleanup and came through with high pressure sprayerers and cleaned it and slurried it out.
there was a big pond.
this is the picture that culvert c where they had some really beautiful rock outcrops and that the creek was moving outside of its bank in this section and had a bunch of vegetation.
the next picture is where western cleaning it up and this is a picture of the same area after we cleaned it.
more before and afters.
the developer had come in and put a big rock pile at the end of the property in order to try to stop some of the movement of the silt off the property.
it wasn't successful, but this is just for marker purposes.
the picture shows the rocks and they used a section of the creek as part of the haul road.
you can see the vegetation is starting to take over and it was just a mess.
that's the picture after we cleaned it up.
>> they were using the creek bed as the haul road?
>> they drove through it, yes.
what we encountered when we were cleaning, every corner of the creek has been a different technique.
in this section we used smaller equipment and washed and hydro pressure behind it.
this next creek section is right behind those rocks.
why I show this, this is a whole new technique.
I couldn't get any small equipment down there without causing more damage with the equipment.
what we did in this situation, this is the before and this is after.
the next spot and hopefully it will kick up by itself.
it's just a picture where we went into the creek with brooms and shovels and we who to slurry it out.
it was a much more manually intensive.
we didn't use equipment in many sections of the creek where it was impossible to get equipment to do the work.
I want to show here a sequence of how we cleaned.
we had a short period of time we could access the ranches.
when we finished the -- the ranches at hamilton pool property, we separated crews and one crew started on the next lane, but a second crew went down to low-water crossing and some of the pictures is where we separated the crews.
the reason we did this is the low-water crossing is the last big hole before hamilton pool and serves as a safety net.
what I was trying to do is essentially clean a natural pool that if we did have a big rainfall event, it would try to protect the pool for any other silt entering the pool.
it couldn't have worked out better timing-wise because we all know what happens quick first part of September.
these two pictures are up scream at hamilton pool road, the low-water crossing.
the picture on the left is before we cleaned it, the picture on the right is after we cleaned it.
we cleaned about 250 feet from the low-water crossing upstream.
and before we started, this is picture facing low-water crossing, that's the road there and the silt was almost flat.
almost to the top of the elevation.
this picture is the under arm where the silt had come out of the creek in high water flow.
this is six to eight inches.
this is six to eight feet of silt, 250 feet long.
next pictures are where we started cleaning.
we did use small equipment here where we brought in small bobcat and had a process where we moved it out.
the picture to the right is after cleanup.
then tropical storm hermine happened and we were fortunate we got our sequence of events and were able to clean up the low-water crossing to some degree to serve as kind of a safety net for any more silt moving down the creek trying to keep it out of hamilton pool.
tropical storm hermine brought 8 to 12 inches of rain over the area.
it served two purposes.
one I got to see upstream in ranches where we had cleaned and to see if it held, and I was holding my breath several times.
but it also provided a whole other set of challenges.
now my creek is flowing full and we didn't want to stop cleanup.
we changed again.
the creek has given several opportunities to go back to textbook.
we designed essentially a coffer dam.
I designed a pump and essentially diverted the water.
you can see this is an old dam that was no longer serves as a dam, but we used it and we sandbagged it and diverted the water around the area we were working on.
so essentially we used that to move to sections down the creek and we would clean in between.
this is another -- you'll see on the map, we made some pretty good progress, but this turned out to be our next challenge.
from this picture this is what you could see from the outside.
the water is fairly high there.
before we started, we dewatered this hole and we found six to eight feet of silt on the bottom of the pool.
we were in this hole almost a week to clean it out.
you can see there the picture of the small excavator.
the top is below the elevation of the pool.
this is picture of in process of the Davis pool where we manually took out hundreds of small dump trucks worth of silt.
it was a mess.
and then the next picture is me standing in the bottom.
you can see the height of what we cleaned out.
went down to limestone bottom.
I want to show you one thing that's happened -- part of the -- what we've -- every time we turn a corner on the creek, something new, we were really surprised to see the number of springs.
as we cleaned up, and I guess unclogged the prescription started popping up everywhere.
we had probably 50 to 100.
so we noticed -- and actually some sections we were trying to dewater and springs started popping up filling in the holes faster than we could dewater them.
it was kind of just a moment where you think, wow, the mud is really clogged up the creek and let its natural -- it's changing the hydrology of it and the ecology of it as well.
so where to now?
we continue to clean up, have crews working every day.
we continued to clean up hamilton creek.
we're now on the meyers property.
the next property will be Travis County.
as we finish up the meyers.
then we move to phase 2, and I'll let the county people, county folks discuss that later.
but we will set up high filter pressures and go in after the silt in the pool itself.
we hope to get clarity back to -- this is an historical picture of hamilton pool.
much better than what we saw with our
>> [indiscernible].
I wanted to show you examples of what we used and I did the cleanup at dead man's hole.
this is picture of high pressure filter is also we brought in.
we used divers and they go in with pretty heavy suction pump, move it up through the filter presses.
then the silt is actually moved off for the pressurer filter systems in the rolloff box and the rolloff box is taken for disposal.
this is video I took when it was raining.
this is hermine.
of course I'm open for questions.
>> would you say given your initial assessment, would you say that now in the field the damage was more significant than you originally thought is this.
>> absolutely.
there were sections I thought were solid turned out to be a three to four foot hole of silt.
it's hardened.
it's like an ice cream cone dipped in chocolate from dairy queen.
it's hard on the bottom but as soon as you crack through it poofs and goes everywhere.
the creek is hardened and vegetation is starting to take over.
we're removing small trees that have rooted into the sediment.
>> what's our prognosis to being able to restore hamilton pool to its standard prior to the spill, I'll call it a spill.
>> I have -- I have -- we have done some measurements.
we've done some slurrys, we're ready to get started and we're going to get as good as we can get.
>> during hermine, did you see any evidence of -- to the fact of whether or not it seems that the ranches at hamilton creek have stabilized or was there additional sediment.
>> we tried to leave it better than we found it, at the same time not making any changes to their on site controls, not taking any responsibility for that.
the county was very insistent on making sure that it was as stabilized as it was going to get before we ever even started.
so the culverts have grassed over and it had held.
it held.
I think it would hold through a disaster, I don't know, but it held through hermine.
>> so in terms of a completion date, what --
>> we are planning at this point to be done with the creek cleanup mid November.
that's our goal.
if we get any more hermines, that slowed us down three to four solid days.
we're trying to set up to try to start filtering the pool in the first part of December.
>> so in terms of a completion date, do we have one?
>> January, February -- end of January, February.
we've got some time for mobilization and final stationization at the end.
we still have to work on -- where we've disposed of the silt, we've designed kind of a clay/topsoil mix and there will be cleanup work to make sure that we're finally stabilized before we leave the area.
>> and this is in the former aggregate mine on one of the neighbor's property.
>> yes, ma'am.
>> it's a nice solution.
thank you for finding that.
that was a gnaty little problem.
judge, may I ask a question about the shortfall?
>> certainly.
>> at the time we negotiated the mediation, we thought that the level of damage was x and it turns out that the legal of damage is x plus -- x plus y, whatever that y is.
so it appears that the y in terms of financials is an additional $334,000 for the cleanup?
>> we have contracted for both phase 1 and phase 2.
as you recall, there was some discussion of the court on whether or not we would proceed with anything until we knew whether we would have a settlement.
and the court decided to go ahead and move on with phase 1.
and budgeted enough money in the contract to do that phase of the contract.
subsequent to initiating cleanup, we did get the settlement, but not for the full amount of the contract.
so the net difference is the 334,000 that you see that needs to be budgeted by the Commissioners court in order to give a notice to proceed to espey to finish the cleanup.
we expect that amount will come from the risk management fund of Travis County.
>> to be clear, there was a $3.5 million settlement of which Travis County received 2.1 and at the time we thought that the 2.1 would be sufficient to cover our cleanup costs to restore our property?
or was that to restore our property and the upstream creek bed owner's property as well?
>> we always understood that the -- Travis County's cleanup would include everything from the head waters down to the pool including the projects to be done on the other property owners' land.
>> I certainly have no beef with that.
we had to clean the upstream left our pool be siltd again.
>> so I believe that the -- you know, our original estimate of the total cleanup cost was in the vicinity of 2.4.
and the 2.1 was basically a negotiated number based on the best we could get making all the other parties satisfied.
>> I suppose the good news take away, the 2.1 of the 2.4 is being borne by the developers responsible, but the taxpayer is bearing the final 334.
>> that's correct.
>> mr. Mansur.
>> the $334,000 shortfall is identified to be covered from the risk fund.
however, with the contingency amount in both contracts of 290,000 plus dollars, we suggested the 334,000 be put into an account that would be identified for use at hamilton pool but not transferred to t.n.r.
until it was needed.
>> I wouldn't trust joe with that amount of money either.
>> [laughter]
>> tceq received moneys in this settlement as well.
is there no responsibility with them for helping complete the cost of the cleanup with their resources?
>> well, their funds -- it was split between attorney general's office and the -- and tceq.
tceq uses some of those dollars for what they call supplemental environmental projects, and approximately $300,000 of the state's share in this instance is in an account to be used for some barton springs cleanup work.
and that is still pending.
>> well, while that is a worthy project, no doubt, and I think that that's -- I believe that, I just have to question why tceq gets part of a settlement here related to this incident and not have some obligation when there is a shortfall to help cover those costs.
>> particularly in light of the fact that tceq was initially willing to settle this case for something less than six figures before Travis County stepped in to take the lead in litigation against the developers.
>> so I would encourage staff to have some conversations with tceq.
>> anything further?
>> you know, I would just like the make sort of a closing comment on this.
I think that the folks at espey have performed magnificently.
I had -- I had, well, extremely low expectations.
I thought they would get in and there would be some cleanup but we would be left with serious issues even into the upper reaches of the head water.
the clear flows that you saw after the tropical storm hermine is really testimony to how effective they have been.
throughout all of these areas it went from areas that were sort of caked from mud in this almost concrete-like material and now it's pebbley, gravel key, you know stream beds and the water is flowing clear.
I think they've done an admirable job and I hope that they will carefully record all of their techniques and brag about it in the future because I think it's well worth it.
>> thank you so much.
>> anything further?
>> that's it.
thank you.
>> thank you very much.
The Closed Caption log for this Commissioners Court agenda item is provided by Travis County Internet Services. Since this file is derived from the Closed Captions created during live cablecasts, there are occasional spelling and grammatical errors. This Closed Caption log is not an official record the Commissioners Court Meeting and cannot be relied on for official purposes. For official records please contact the County Clerk at (512) 854-4722.
Last Modified:
Tuesday, October 12, 2010 6:33 PM
