Fort Hancock is a community in Hudspeth County that experiences unique challenges due to frequent flash flooding, non-traditional/unregulated housing, and community berm construction. Roads and bridges washing out are a particular danger and concern to the county.

The County Judge, County Commissioner, and Emergency Management Coordinator are all interested in addressing flooding issues in this community, but there are no up-to-date traditional flood data sources available to accurately map, model, and communicate the current risks to the community. Fort Hancock does not show up in traditional risk analyses anywhere as being at risk for flooding, but they are flooding almost every year from smaller, flash-flood events.

The DRIP team and county leaders decided on this unique pilot project designed specifically to address the “data desert” found in small, underserved communities like Fort Hancock. This project developed a process to collect community-held knowledge (such as photos; verbal descriptions of water lines and dates of major storms leading to flooding; and verbal identification of areas/locations prone to flooding, etc.) to inform future mapping and modeling products. 

The main products were: 

• A process to systematically collect data to document and describe flooding in this flash-flood vulnerable community, initially through a Qualtrics survey which was then field tested and developed into a custom application to collect community survey data and photos (in both Spanish and English); and
• A GIS Data Viewer to display the information collected from the community along with official flood data sources from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Texas Water Development Board, combined with other information, such as the location of structures.