City staff, volunteers start cleaning up flood-damaged Lake Grapevine

Spring brought the city to near-record-breaking flooding of Lake Grapevine, with receding waters leaving a lot of nasty and scary stuff behind.

On Sept. 12, Keep Grapevine Beautiful and the city responded with the first organized communitywide cleanup.

They named it Project Restore Flood 2015.

During four hours that morning, more than 200 volunteers, city staffers and others came to Oak Grove Soccer Complex to collect debris and clean up exposed lake parks and trails.

“Everything is kind of drying out, although there is still a lot of muck and whatever going on,” said Kathy Nelson, capital improvement projects and planning manager for the Grapevine Parks and Recreation Department. “We need to scrub and paint and repair some things.”

Grapevine remains among the hardest hit in the area with its many parks and many roads, most of them park roads, under water at one point.

Grapevine Mayor William D. Tate and Flower Mound Mayor Tom Hayden signed disaster declarations in June after Tropical Depression Bill’s landfall dropped several inches of rain on North Texas and increased the level of Lake Grapevine.

“It is very difficult to estimate with everything still under water,” Liz Dimmick, Grapevine’s emergency management coordinator, said of the millions of dollars of damage.

As the water recedes, people wanting to help clean up the area “are constantly asking what can we do,” Nelson said.

“Before it gets too cold, we wanted people to get out and enjoy the lake and lake parks,” she said.

Keep Grapevine Beautiful is organized to preserve and enhance the local natural environment by strengthening residents’ levels of commitment through educational programs and engaging volunteer-based projects.

This story was originally published September 23, 2015 at 11:30 AM with the headline "City staff, volunteers start cleaning up flood-damaged Lake Grapevine."