One year after flash flooding deluged Denton, most residents have repaired their homes and businesses, crews better maintain ditches and culverts, and several cities are considering new drainage projects.

DRC/Barron Ludlum

After Mary Holland’s home in Aubrey flooded in April 2007, restoration crews raised the floor of her living room before repairing the walls.

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At Sleeping Lizzards, a gift shop on North Elm Street, reminders of last year’s flood persisted long after the water receded.

“We were still cleaning for months,” co-owner Beth Klein said. “We would open up something and it would still be filled with water.”

But as old routines return, a quiet un­ease remains. Flood risk is less obvious on the North Texas prairie than on the banks of the Mississippi or the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Many residents learned on April 24, 2007, that catastrophe can fall from the sky in minutes.

“Every time it rains, we’re all out of bed,” said David Newell, whose home was flooded on Craig Lane in northeast Denton, one of the city’s hardest-hit residential areas. “We all live in fear that if a heavy downpour comes, is it flooding again?”

Denton and the surrounding area received Hill Country-like downpours, from 5 to 10 inches of rain falling in about four hours, most in less than two. Runoff be­sieged Denton’s outdated drain­age channels, flooding an estimated 175 homes and businesses and closing roads across the city.

The storm brought the first, but not the worst, in last year’s series of floods. No one was killed in Denton County, but the storm’s ferocity portended of things to come. Two months later, similar storms in Gainesville and Haltom City did claim lives, including 4-year-old Ally Collins, who was pulled from her mother’s arms by the current.

Newell said the first flood left him with $50,000 in debt. New­ell, 32, a self-employed auto me­chanic, lost most of his belongings when more than 2 feet of water soaked his home. He’d moved his wife and five children from New Jersey just two months earlier.

“We literally had to take every wall out of the house and change everything and anything,” Newell said. “I would have been better off just building a new home and walking away from this.”

So many people and businesses suffered property losses that the county was declared a disaster area. Federal agencies had distributed $598,110 in assistance as of August, according to the last report received by Denton County Emergency Management.

Some people have walked away, as one of Newell’s Craig Lane neighbors did.

In Aubrey, John and Mary Holland got help from insurance, the Federal Emergency Manage­ment Agency and family to repair their home and improve drainage around it after their neighborhood flooded, but they’ve put their house up for sale.

The Hollands’ neighbor, Shirley Beaty, got help from Hearts For Homes in rebuilding her home. Another neighbor moved away, Mary Holland said, and another house in the neighborhood is for sale.

The home of Bryan Hutchin­son, former pastor of First Baptist Church of Argyle, also flooded.

He has moved away, as did one resident of Argyle’s Ben Boyd neighborhood. David Miller had be­come known for kayaking down the street after the rain in Argyle, but that day he also helped the woman living in a ren­tal house at the bottom of the hill pack up to leave.

“She left that day,” said Miller’s mother, Daphyne Miller. “She had 3 inches of water flowing through her house.”

The Texas Hill Country is known as “flash flood alley,” according to U.S. Army Corps engineer Clay Church, with rates of rainfall among the highest in the world. When conditions are similar in North Texas, rain can fall at the same torrential rate.

“If it rains really hard — 5 or 7 or 9 inches an hour — in an area, it can flood any small stream or tributary in a short amount of time,” Church said, adding that there’s not much anyone can do when faced with that amount of water.

Since last year’s floods, the Army Corps of Engineers has fo­cused its study on the creeks in Gainesville and Haltom City, and has not done any additional study in Denton or the surrounding area. The corps has left that to local officials, Church said.

Argyle Town Administrator Lyle Dresher said his town has been working with new maps for the past six months, which has helped. The town engineer re­vised the master drainage plan after the flood.

About 30 years ago, when cities first began working with 100-year-floodplain maps, Dresher said the data was much better in the cities than in rural areas. As Denton County grows, there isn’t always good data available to guide the builders.

“Some development has been guesswork,” Dresher said.

Argyle has better data now, but drainage projects are expensive, he said. Even if the town limited itself to the top three projects, the cost would exceed several million dollars as well as the town’s bonding capacity, Dresher said. In­stead, Argyle is going to focus on maintenance of culverts and ditches.

Officials said areas of Denton likely saw a 100-year flood, which has a 1 percent chance of happening in any year. But only one city drainage channel — part of Pecan Creek in Southeast Denton — was built to handle such a storm.

Since the flood, Denton leaders have earmarked nearly $15 million for drainage improvements, city spokesman John Cabrales said. That includes more than $7 million of work funded by a tax increase the City Council approved last fall. Bonds and drainage fee revenue are funding the other projects.

Cabrales said the city already repaired channels and bridges damaged in the storm, and other improvements are in progress or under design. Still, he said it would take “quite some time” to upgrade the overall system.

“We’re asking our citizens to bear with staff as we try and address these drainage issues that have been created over years’ time,” he said.

The projects included im­proved drainage channels at Cooper Creek in the Mingo Road area. Many residents blamed poor city drainage and debris-clogged creek beds when the April 24 flood damaged nearly two dozen homes on Craig Lane, which borders Cooper Creek. Another storm in June soaked backyards and submerged at least one vehicle but stopped short of entering most homes, neighbors said.

Since then, the city cleared about 135 tons of dirt, trash, underbrush, wood debris and trees from the creek, Cabrales said. Craig Lane resident Cindy Brazzel said the work may have improved the water flow.

“We haven’t seen heavy rains like we had last year, so we really can’t test it,” Brazzel said. “But it seems like it helped us.”

PEGGY HEINKEL-WOLFE can be reached at 940-566-6881. Her e-mail address is pheinkel-wolfe@dentonrc.com .

LOWELL BROWN can be reached at 940-566-6882. His e-mail address is lmbrown@dentonrc.com .