City Of Bixby To Offer Dumpsters To Residents After Flooding Causes $2 Million In Damage

Bixby residents continue to clean up an estimated $2 million in flood damage to the Southtown neighborhood after last week's flooding.

Some residents are concerned debris in a nearby creek made the flooding worse and want the city to take action.

The last major flooding events in the Southtown neighborhood were in 2015 and 2008. Neighbors are wondering what, if anything, can be done to make the next flood less severe.

As people's lives spill into their front yards and driveways in the Southtown neighborhood, they wonder what's next.

Katie Franke was focused on cleaning out the garage on Tuesday, as she deals with her first flood. “Some of the boxes we haven't opened since we moved here a few years ago from Alaska,” Franke said.

She said there was so much water flowing into her home that her freezer started floating. "Believe it or not, we plugged it in after we brought it out here and it instantly started working,” she said. "It's like a historic freezer now.”

At Monday night’s city council meeting, Bixby residents expressed concerns about what they are calling a "blockage" in Little Snake Creek. Some said large logs and debris in the creek made flooding worse.

"What happens if it rains in two weeks? How slow does the rules of government happen?” one man asked among a crowd of other residents at the meeting.

On the phone, City Manager Jared Cottle said pictures taken Tuesday show there was not a true blockage. Cottle said he does not believe debris made flooding worse for the neighborhood.

“I don’t have any evidence based on our pictures that there was a debris blockage,” Cottle said, explaining that if there were a blockage, there would still be logs present.

The city is allocating $20,000 for the use of large roll off dumpsters to help with clean up. City leaders hope those will be available sometime this week, but do not have an exact timeframe yet.

"We started the very next day with cleanup, so I think we're kinda past that point of it,” Franke said.

She attended a 6:00 p.m. city council meeting on Monday. “I was really hoping to hear a little bit more about why it happened, do we know why it happened, how do we prevent it from happening again? Do we need to move?"

The Bixby City Manager also reached out to Tulsa County Commissioners for help, and they offered the use of three roll off dumpsters.