[water sloshing] [Announcer] Major funding for this program was provided by the Winn Family Foundation, the Community Foundation of the Texas Hill Country, Pam and Mike Reese, and Cindy Meehl.

Additional funding was provided by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Foundation, the Upper Guadalupe River Authority, the Hunt Preservation Society, Rand and Kelly Harbert, Nelson Puett, Michelle Pokorny, Jeff Harkinson, and American Rivers.

Thank you.

[birds chirping] [mellow music] - Well, I've spent many hours sitting on the banks of the Guadalupe River.

♪ ♪ Sometimes by myself, sometimes with the children, sometimes with the grandchildren.

[birds chirping] [water sloshing] And it's a very peaceful river when it's at base flow.

[water sloshing] [birds chirping] It's not one of the largest rivers in Texas, but it's perhaps one of the most beautiful, if not the most iconic, [birds chirping] tranquil, alluring, [birds chirping] truly a gem of a river.

[mellow music] ♪ ♪ Because of its beauty, everybody wants to come here, just be in and near the river.

And that's both good and bad because we know that this river is a flood-prone river.

That's been well-known for a long, long time.

Everyone knows it's called flash flood alley for a reason.

♪ ♪ And that's the terrible part of the Guadalupe River.

It's beautiful and it's terrible.

And those two things can be only hours apart.

It's just the nature of the river.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [water running] [water sloshing] - I have lived along the Guadalupe River my entire life.

I have photos of me being here when I was born.

So, I was probably a few weeks old, taken down to the river by my grandparents and my parents.

My grandparents came here in 1927 and fell in love with the river.

[mellow music] And they found solace here and they found a community here.

It's a place where people are drawn to.

Families come, and they bring their children, they bring their children's children, they bring their friends.

And it really is an eddy of... happiness.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ I don't even know how to describe it sometimes because it's so deep and beautiful.

[water sloshing] Before the July 4th flood, my grandparents' studio was here and a garage.

And then beyond that was a three-bedroom, two-bath house, and then a barn.

And those were all gone, taken out by the water.

Across the way, the houses that were there are now gone.

[somber music] Several friends and neighbors across the river did not make it.

♪ ♪ - Thunderstorms began to form on July the 3rd, or early morning of July 4th.

[thunder rumbling] And they continued to form and they continued to form over and over again in just a rare catastrophic type of thunderstorm.

[thunder crashing] You have this massive area receiving continuous heavy rainfall hour, after hour, after hour.

In some cases, 10 inches in an hour.

[rain pattering] [thunder crashing] About 1:00, flooding was beginning; the river rising very rapidly.

[rushing water] [thunder rumbling] It was July 4th, and so the river was saturated with people, with families, with campers.

They were asleep.

They didn't know what was happening.

[thunder rumbling] [rushing water] [Videographer] 6:08 AM.

Guadalupe River.

[rushing water] At Nimitz Dam on Guadalupe Street.

Good God.

This is 173.

Not good.

[Videographer 4] Ah.

[house crashing] [rushing water] [siren wailing] [rushing water] [Reporter 1] Video, as you can see, pouring into our newsroom, showing just how fast and how high that flood water is moving.

[Reporter 2] People, including many children, found and airlifted to safety.

The challenges, though, are numerous.

The water moved debris and those caught up in it large distances.

This is a place where they are used to flooding.

But on this July 4th holiday weekend, it was on another level.

[somber music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [Jonathan] When you go into the individual level of what it did to those families, it just wrenches your heart.

Prayers are with you.

What you're going through has to be unbearable.

[mellow music] ♪ ♪ During the days and weeks after the flood, the search and rescue operations were something like I've never seen.

There were people from all over the state and the nation here.

♪ ♪ [chainsaw whirring] - The search and rescue operations were heroic.

People came from everywhere, and volunteers and individuals were here on the ground helping and looking.

♪ ♪ There were canine dogs, there were helicopters, there were government agencies, there were nonprofit groups.

Everybody was showing up here to help.

Having people show up is the biggest gift.

♪ ♪ - The amount of debris that was cleaned up is estimated to be about 1.8 million tons.

It's hard to comprehend how much that actually is.

A lot of brush, trees, and vegetation.

It is estimated that 52% of the vegetation in Kerr County along the riparian area is gone.

The cleanup effort was... It's incomprehensible.

There's no question that the amount of that heavy machinery right along the sensitive riparian area did cause ecological damage.

[machinery whirring] There was a lot of destruction by big machinery.

It was necessary, but it needs to be recovered and repaired.

[machinery beeping] - With the amount of debris that was removed from the banks of the Guadalupe River, it's more critical now than ever that we take an active role in restoring those banks, in seeding native grasses and planting those riparian trees, and bringing back the life that will ultimately hold the banks in place and prepare us for the next flood.

So, we've hosted a series of workshops to help train landowners on how to be a good part of that recovery process for their creeks and rivers.

[Host] So, he is gonna have a bunch of great information for y'all today, and give it up for Steve.

[audience applauding] - What emotions and what thoughts come to mind for you personally as you look at and think about what the river was like before the flood?

What it provided, what it produced, and the things you did and enjoyed about the river.

Then, the unthinkable happened, but the message that we bring you today is not looking back on how horrible it was.

Our message today is that this river will heal.

How does a river heal up after such a catastrophic flood?

It happens with plants.

And so here are your best friends that you need to get to know, and they are gonna be what's able to transform a gravel bar like that, a flood-scoured gravel bar, into something that's functional.

Three sedges, Emory's sedge, sawgrass, spike-rush, your best friends.

Three grasses, switchgrass, eastern gamagrass, bushy bluestem.

Get to know them, learn to recognize them.

Three woody plants, sycamore, Baccharis, cypress.

These plants are gonna do 80% of the healing along the Guadalupe River.

So in these bags of seed is a lot of switchgrass and some other good stuff.

Later on, there'll be sycamore that will be given out next year and the year after.

So this is not a one-time deal, this is just the beginning, trying to help you get the materials to help your river bank.

Even though nature is gonna heal it up, sometimes we can be a good partner with nature and help things to happen a little bit better and a little bit faster.

This is a really impressive example of how cypress roots and how cypress trees stabilize these banks.

So, with that big... That's big old tree there, obviously, but its roots.

Look at the root system.

This main route going this way goes far back this way.

And then there's secondary roots going down deep, branching off of that main route going downward.

And that's why this tree could hold together against a 37 1/2 feet flood waters.

And the same size root exists on the other side.

So, it's actually built its own natural biological retaining wall.

And there's no engineers that can even come close to building some kind of bank structural system that would do as good a job as cypress.

So what we need all up and down the Guadalupe is more cypress trees.

We need tens of thousands of baby cypress, dogwood, walnut.

Shrubs, bushes, grasses, sedges by the hundreds, by the thousands.

We need them in that density.

When we have a healthy, intact riparian area, the destructiveness of the water is reduced.

The energy of that water flowing down is dissipated.

The water actually has less energy, it does less damage.

And that's the role of this riparian vegetation is to physically disrupt and hinder the velocity of that water, slowing it down where it's not as angry, it's not as hungry, it's less destructive.

So, from a human safety standpoint, I think we could say in general that an intact riparian area that slows down the water is better for human safety than a naked barren floodplain, where the water is gushing as fast as gravity will take it.

[water flowing] [children chattering] We've distributed more than 2,000 pounds of seeds, given away more than 1,000 live plants, and in the next years, we'll be giving away more than 15,000 live rooted sedges, 9,000 grasses, and much more seed.

Come look at it.

It's got like, fluffy stuff.

We want to see a jumpstarting of all of the plants that were here before the flood, getting both the function of those plants, but also the diversity of plants and trees to do all of the recovery work that we want to see for this river.

- Six, five.

- Four, three, two, one.

[all laughing] [mellow music] - We at the garden knew we had to do something and not just something, but something big, something that had an impact, that supported not just the community of the Guadalupe, but also the health of the ecosystem.

And that was the Trees Initiative, which is a planting of 50,000 trees over the next few years.

Our goal is to replant the trees that were lost in the flood.

This starts by collecting seeds locally.

Everything that we're growing, we're collecting from the Guadalupe Watershed.

We then take that seed back to the garden.

It's cleaned and processed by volunteers, packaged up, weighed.

We ship that out or take it to various nurseries throughout Central Texas, where there's about a dozen that we work with.

They're growing out those seeds.

And this fall, we will begin our first planting.

♪ ♪ When we go to planting, we'll be working with volunteer groups and local communities within the areas affected by the flood.

♪ ♪ Here, we have a half flat of bald cypress that the folks here at Native Texas Nursery are growing.

So these are what about three to four inches tall now.

So these will be some of our first plants that we put in the ground this fall.

Oh, they've got a wonderful future ahead of them.

They've got plenty of people that are gonna take care of them and make sure that they have a long, healthy life.

[mellow music] [leaves rustling] ♪ ♪ - Sometimes, it's tempting to say, "I give up."

The sadness is so overwhelming, thinking about all the friends I lost and neighbors I've lost.

And we just feel like that maybe healing the river is also healing people and it gives you a positive moment.

Instead of focusing on what's happened and the negativity, which is easy to focus on, it allows you to feel like you're moving forward.

[birds chirping] [mellow music] [Steve] So, how do people restore riparian areas?

There's two key fundamentals.

One is a combination of passive and active management, and the other one is really more important, and that is your own personal ethic of land stewardship.

Do you love your land enough to give it a priority and take responsibility?

Do you love that land enough to understand it and learn what's necessary?

♪ ♪ It's a deeply-held inner conviction inside of you that motivates you to care for and to sustain the land that has been entrusted to you.

♪ ♪ And why do you do it?

♪ ♪ For the benefit of future generations, incorporating that stewardship into their lives, ♪ ♪ partly for your own personal benefit, and that includes economic benefit.

[birds chirping] The steward also does things for the benefits to society because what you do on your piece of the river affects other people.

And part of stewardship is being a good neighbor and working with your neighbor because that river is a shared resource.

♪ ♪ It has been said that those who do not understand nature are destined to deplete it.

But the good news and the converse of this is that those who understand nature best are compelled to conserve it.

♪ ♪ [Child] Race you back!

[children screaming] Race you back!

[children laughing] [mellow music] [Steve] This river will heal.

It's healing that injury.

Let it do its work.

Let it grow, let it grow, let it grow.

♪ ♪ The river will heal.

The river will heal.

♪ ♪ [gentle uplifting music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [water flowing] [Announcer] Major funding for this program was provided by the Winn Family Foundation, the Community Foundation of the Texas Hill Country, Pam and Mike Reese, and Cindy Meehl.

Additional funding was provided by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Foundation, the Upper Guadalupe River Authority, the Hunt Preservation Society, Rand and Kelly Harbert, Nelson Puett, Michelle Pokorny, Jeff Harkinson, and American Rivers.

Thank you.