Rob: Protecting and repairing the land is the job of Oklahoma's
conservation districts.
Earlier, I sat down with their executive director, Clay Pope.
This coming legislative session, we know that we've seen some dramatic
rains this year, what has that meant for some farmland and some of our
agricultural land in the state?
Clay Pope: We've seen a real shock to the system in Oklahoma as far as the
conservation infrastructure is concerned.
You'll be hard pressed to find a place in Oklahoma where there's not a
significant number of terraces that have been damaged from the flooding,
waterways that have been significantly damaged.
You go into Kingfisher, Blaine and Caddo Counties, with the big storm that we
saw on August the 19th, probably anywhere from a third to two-thirds of the
farm ponds have been blown out south of 33 Highway in those three counties.
You look at Caddo County where you have highly
erodible land to begin with.
Areas like Sugar Creek and Fort Cobb have seen
significant amounts of erosion.
Land that's basically, you know, thousands of acres, literally thousands of
acres that on August the 18th were in place, were farm ground with
productive land, now they're in the bottom of Lake Texoma.
I mean, so that's, we've seen those sort of things happen.
You look at the flood control structures in Oklahoma; we have over
2,000 flood control dams.
We had at least 25, just on the August 19th storm alone that saw water go
through their emergency spillway.
We had two that almost broke.
The system worked well though.
I'm saying all this about these damages.
It worked exactly like it was supposed to.
It contained the damage, we saw over $300 million in the savings that
Oklahoma doesn't have to pay for because the structure was in place.
But just like any other piece of infrastructure, when you have that much
stress on it, you have to go out and do the repairs.
It's done what it was supposed to do.
It provided that protection, but it's been under so much stress,
going all the way back to last spring.
We've got to do some repair.
We've got to get out there and make sure that system is in place before we see
another rain event.
Because of the level of damage that we've seen, there's a lot of dollars,
in fact we've estimated about $30 million worth
of damage that has to be repaired.
That's a big number.
And so that's, you know, when you figure that the conservation budget last
year which was the largest we've ever had in history was 18.5 million, and now
over the course of 6 to 7 months we've seen about $30 million worth of
damage, it's a big, big number.
But everyone recognizes, I think, the benefits, again over $300 million worth of
savings that came from this, the fact that we do have, been able to
maintain our soils, that we're not seeing the level of erosion from water that
we saw prior to the construction of the
terraces and the waterways.
I think everybody recognizes that; it's just the idea of coming up with
the resources to get that done.
Rob: Am I correct in believing that, you know, we're so cognizant here of
knowing what erosion can do, but water erosion does more damage than wind?
Pope: If I remember my numbers right, there was somewhere in the
neighborhood of about 20 percent of the Oklahoma farmland that had been
abandoned because of water erosion.
There were millions of acres of farmland that had to simply be abandoned up
into the 1930s because of the gullies, because of the erosion that we were
seeing, because of water.
And then of course, the dustbowl was the main event that caught
everybody's attention.
But that's why the whole idea of conservation, whether it be to control
wind erosion or water erosion started, and definitely we've seen the
benefits, because many of those acres were put back into production that were
repaired, they were healed, and have been productive assets for the
state of Oklahoma and for those landowners who own that property.
And, we want to make sure that never goes back to what we saw before,
because you know, in talking about bio fuels today, and the struggle
between food and fuel, we're going to need every productive acre that we
can, and we want to keep those assets in production.
And that's the thing that's just another piece of that, to make sure
they're productive, to make sure that productivity stays in
place, that the next generation enjoys the bounty that we've seen and
can build on that; that's really what we're in business for.
And I think again, the system's worked well.
It's shown its benefit over the last 70 years.
And hopefully now, when we're seeing these wild weather events, we can get
the dollars out there to make sure it's in place for another 70 years.
Rob: And to learn more about the importance of Oklahoma's flood control
dams, just head to our website and click on value added.