New Year Brings New Funding To Study Flooding On Cabin Creek

Millboro, VA – The New Year will bring an opportunity for more research on Cabin Creek in Millboro to see why the creek has been flooding more severely in recent years. Bath County will receive a $6,848 grant from the Chesapeake Bay Restoration Fund. Bath Supervisor Carol Hardbarger, the Millboro district representative, is very involved in the effort to study Cabin Creek.

“We have a problem with flooding in Millboro that has gotten worse since 2006 when we had a major flood there” says Hardbarger. “There are about a dozen homes, possibly more that are affected. And there is concern about runoff from the railroad track, oils and things like that affecting the health of the creek and the watershed there.”

In this time of tight budgets, no county money is available for Cabin Creek research. This is the second grant that has been received for Cabin Creek. A $10,000 planning grant paid for a stream walk last March.

Bath County staff, high school students, natural resource agencies and Millboro residents participated. The stream walk was done to find out what features along the stream might be contributing to the more severe flooding. The money from this new grant will be used to monitor Cabin Creek. Bath County Planning and Zoning Administrator, Sherry Ryder.

“We will be purchasing monitoring equipment, rain gauges, we’ll even have some wireless rain gauges” she says. “It’s for the residents and students [to be] involved in stream monitoring and habitat monitoring; try to figure out where some of the flooding is occurring.”

An engineering study might provide answers to the Cabin Creek flooding, but those studies are very expensive. The data that will be collected as a result of the new grant will help provide the base information for an engineering study. But an engineering study will also have to be paid for with grant money.

“I think that it’s an opportunity for the community to come together” says Hardbarger. “People have felt as if they’ve been abandoned to a certain extent because they haven’t been able to get anything done about the problem. What has worked is the involvement of the citizens and their willingness to be patient, but also to help with the process of the stream monitoring.”

The money from the new grant will be available at the end of June.