Click to enlarge GARY SEWELL / HERALD DEMOCRAT A Denison fire truck diverted traffic off Crawford and Lillis Wednesday morning with water over the road in front of B. McDaniel School.

Click to enlarge CHRIS JENNINGS/HERALD DEMOCRAT State Highway 289 in Gunter was temporarily closed after water ran over the road on the south edge of town.

STAFF REPORTS

HERALD DEMOCRAT

Grayson County soil is saturated and the possibility of more rain throughout Wednesday night raised the potential for disaster. However, local officials said that lessons learned during the 2007 flooding has led to planning that might mitigate damage and, they hope, avoid loss of life.

Other areas to the north and east weren't so lucky. The storm that generated 3.4 inches of rain near the North Texas Regional Airport produced tornadoes in northeast Texas and southeast Oklahoma. Several tornadoes also touched down in Dallas. At 6 p.m. Wednesday, Grayson County and the rest of North Texas was under a tornado watch.

City of Sherman Public Works Director Jeff Miller said it was "just by the grace of God that rains slowed" a little more than two hours after a band of storms passed through from Tropical Storm Hermine.

"Another 20 minutes of raining that hard and we would have been in severe trouble with this storm," Miller said. "We were just so lucky that it moved east of us so quickly."

When the remnants of tropical storm Hermine made their way into Grayson County, county leaders were already working on solutions to problems they feared might arise.

Though everyone breathed a sigh of relief when the rain slacked off before the rivers left their banks Wednesday afternoon, no one knew exactly what the night might bring. At 6 p.m., Weather.com was still calling for heavy rain for the area from 10 p.m. into Thursday morning, when rain is expected to taper off.

"At 5 a.m. (Wednesday) we had commissioner's road crews out looking at those roads (that had been identified as likely to flood) and were barricading them off," Grayson County Judge Drue Bynum said Wednesday afternoon.

Asked to pinpoint a difference between what happened Wednesday and what happened during the serious flooding of 2007, Bynum said the area got lucky this time because the rain backed off for a while. Also, there has been a lot of work done since 2007.

"We have been working diligently with every city in the county and the unincorporated areas to come up with a mediation plan," Bynum said. While they have yet to have a chance to put the full plan into place, Bynum said ongoing preparation for it allowed county leaders and leaders of the cities within the county to have better information about problem areas.

"We know what roads are likely to flood and at what stage they are likely to flood," Bynum said. Also, he said, communication was better Wednesday than it was in 2007.

"When you need to know what is going on in Gunter (one of the areas hardest hit Wednesday), you need to know who to call and you need two or three numbers in case the first person you call is out," he said.

Grayson County Emergency Manager Sarah Somers had those numbers Wednesday, Bynum said. He said area fire departments have put a lot of time into working on water rescues since 2007.

"There were three water rescues that were done today," Bynum said.

Grayson County Commissioner Jackie Crisp said there were 21 places in his precinct where water went over the roads.

"We have got every single barricade that we have out right now and we are on call," Crisp said Wednesday afternoon.

He said two roads that didn't flood are two that FEMA helped identify and correct after the 2007 floods.

"Vaughn Road was one," Crisp said. He said FEMA paid to have that road raised up and to put in new tinhorns.

"It worked real well. It looked good today and didn't get any water over it," he said.

Another such road, Crisp said, was Turkey Farm Road.

"We spent a good nine hours putting up signs and cleaning out tinhorns and trying to get water off the roads," Crisp said. He said people have just got to pay attention to those signs.

In Precinct 1, Grayson County Commissioner Johnny Waldrip said the roads that have been worked on since 2007 also held out well.

Willy Vestor Road, Waldrip said, is one of those. "We brought in some engineers from Texas A&M and had them help us fix that road," Waldrip said. He said they did the same thing for Hines Ranch Road.

Those roads stayed above water.

"We were fortunate in that we had only about four trees down on Lincoln Park Road and we just closed the bridge on Choctaw Creek at Luella Road and Davenport," Waldrip said.

When asked to what he attributed the difference between 2007 and 2010, Waldrip said, "We have done some trimming back of trees and we [reworked] two or three roads and added extra tinhorns to two or three roads," he said.

Commissioner Gene Short agreed that the breaks in the rain Wednesday helped the area avoid flooding on par with 2007.

"We had a heck of a lot of rain and we had a few places where water went over the road, but we were in pretty good shape," he said. Short said his crews would remain on call throughout the night Wednesday and into Thursday morning.

Sherman city officials closed the usual suspects in terms of roads and underpasses as the storm blew through just before noon. Miller said that some residents reported water in their yards threatening to come into their homes, but he didn't hear anything from residents in the northeast part of the city where problems have been reported in the past.

City workers prepared for the storm by setting out barricades in places that tend to flood. Those will remain near frequently flooding places so they can be closed if heavy rains return.

He said city workers began the emergency step plan the city has been using since the floods in 2007. Mindful of what was happening on the weather radar, they positioned street crews to work in cooperation with Sherman Fire Department and Police Department personnel.

"We moved into the Street Department to set up a central command post for Public Works," Miller said. "We route all phone calls to one line so you can keep an organized response effort going. We keep a centralized list. In a situation like we had today (Wednesday), we are fairly autonomous in our response and we coordinate with the other departments. The more serious a situation gets, the more we move under Jeff's (Sherman Fire Chief J.J. Jones) direct command."

Jones is the emergency management coordinator for the city of Sherman. Miller said that all the city departments have participated with Jones' leadership along with Police Chief Tom Watt to develop the different levels of emergency preparedness.

Denison City Manager Larry Cruise said Denison didn't seem to get as much rain and therefore didn't experience as much flooding. He added Pool Road, which is near TMC, was impassible, but the layout made detouring easy.

"I have not heard of anything really significant," Cruise said. Denison emergency workers, like their comrades in other Grayson County cities, were sure to keep a vigil throughout the night to make sure the storm Hermine didn't produce a disaster here.

Herald Democrat reporters Jerrie Whitely, Kathy Williams and Jonathan Cannon contributed to this report.