CLARKESVILLE – After more than a week, the City of Clarkesville is continuing to deal with the impacts of Hurricane Delta.
One city department that remains displaced from flooding is Clarkesville Fire Department.
Despite work by a water restoration company, ongoing cleanup and repairs have forced the displacement of duty personnel from the fire station on Adams Street.
“It’s not habitable at this point in time, so what they’re doing is they’re actually staying up here at city hall at night,” Dickerson said. “We’re functioning fully. All the trucks are fine. We’ve got enough gear to operate. We’re fully capable of operating at this time.”
Some fire hose likely will be disposed of because a diesel fuel can spilled on it when it toppled over during flooding of the fire station, Dickerson said.
Firefighting turnout gear that was affected by flooding has been sent off for commercial cleaning and rental gear should arrive from Texas this week.
“As soon as the other gear gets here, we’ll be completely up and full force,” Dickerson said. “They’re just going to operate out of city hall until we get some things fixed down there.”
This is not the first time the fire station has flooded, and the latest incident is accelerating the city’s hope of building a new station on property purchased on West Water Street adjacent to the police department.
“I’m hustling as hard as I can to see if I can find some sort of grant that we can build where we bought the property to build a public safety facility on,” Dickerson said. “We are working diligently trying to find some sort of funding mechanism that we can do that without having to throw a bunch of money at it ourselves.”
One funding opportunity is a 75% grant with a 25% local match, which Dickerson said possibly could be handled with 15-year, low-interest financing.
Dickerson said drainage improvements at the fire station, made after the last time it flooded, were simply not enough to handle the volume of floodwaters that inundated it and the Clarkesville-Habersham County Library.
“It just overflowed everything in the system,” Dickerson said. “When you looked at it, there was nowhere for the water to go. Once the river backs up, the creek backs up, there’s just nowhere for all that water to go.”
Pitts Park reopens
Pitts Park, which was submerged by the rushing waters of the adjacent Soque River following Hurricane Delta, reopened Tuesday afternoon, but the Clarkesville Greenway remains closed.
“Pitts Park is open, and staff will continue to clean up over the next several weeks, but it is usable at this time,” Dickerson said Tuesday afternoon.
“The Greenway is going to take a little longer,” Dickerson said.
City will request river evaluation
During Monday night's Clarkesville City Council meeting, Dickerson said once repairs and immediate needs calm down, the city is going to contact the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to ask officials to look for any problems downriver.
“Has anyone done an evaluation of the Soque below us all the way to the Chattahoochee to see if we’ve got a major jam?” said Councilman Franklin Brown.
City officials said siltation at Habersham Lake, formerly owned by Habersham Mills, may be causing a backup that is prevent excess water from leaving the city.
“It could be so silted down there that there’s no hole for it to go into,” Dickerson said. “When you look at it from Google Earth, that’s what it looks like. It looks like there’s not a Lake Habersham anymore. It looks like it’s divided up into sections. I don’t know if that’s river silt that’s caused that.”
Dickerson said the city will invite Soque River Watershed Association representatives to the meeting with the Corps when it happens.
“It’s something to look at,” Dickerson said. “We’ll get with them and see if they have any answers.”
