In the past two years, the Santa Barbara Airport has closed three times due to flooding. Now the airport has a three-step flood prevention plan and has just deployed two of those mitigation methods.
"So you're looking at 3,000 linear feet of concrete K-rail, and we were able to place this over two days," said Brad Klinzing, Santa Barbara Airport Supervising Engineer.
Klinzing says the barriers along the northwest portion of the Santa Barbara airfield are the second short-term phase in the airport's new flood prevention plan.
"This plastic sheeting that’s going to wrap around the K-rail creates more of a waterproof barrier so that if the creek should overtop its banks, it has kind of this secondary berm here to ensure that water stays off of our airfield," Klinzing explained.
This phase of the project follows the placement of Tiger Dams along Firestone Road last week which will form a barrier to protect the property.
WATCH: Water-filled Tiger Dams installed at Santa Barbara Airport
Airport Marketing Supervisor Angie Daus says flood prevention is a high priority.
"We want to make sure that we're prepared because it's vital for our community to have this commercial service and for our airfield not to be shut down," Daus said.
This second phase of flood prevention cost the airport $210,000. The next phase, coming this Fall, will begin with dredging Carneros Creek.
"Over the years of these storms, they transport sediment and then you get a lot of vegetation that grows in and it restricts it, kind of chokes it down so it can no longer carry the same amount of flows that it did 20 years ago," Klinzing explained.
Daus tells KSBY that each phase of the project is done with the environment in mind.
"We want to ensure that we can maintain operational efficiency and keep the airfield open while still having very limited to no impact to the environment," Daus said.
Airport officials say this is a short-term solution as they pursue a more involved project for flood prevention coming up this fall.
