GBRA to drain Lake McQueeny!!

[LDA6339]

This whole thing is a bummer, I hope it gets worked out.

[captain planet]

This whole thing is a bummer, I hope it gets worked out.

I agree. I would probably have a mental breakdown if this happened at our lake.

[CrashCourse316]

Then we would be after dam terrorists!!!!

Fixed it

[mastercraftka]

A fix is being designed, however the minimum time is likely 3 years.

Property has lost some value, but it is still riverfront in an already expensive part of the state. The counties do, however, have a vested interest in investing in the repair(s) because of the potential of diminshed property tax revenues. We do not have state income tax in TX, therefore property taxes are much higher here than in many states that do.

Building of a fixed coffer dam significantly increases the risk of floods due to the inability to lower the top. In order to pass the same amount of water as the dam in its lowered positions, you would need 1500 LF of "weir" or cofferdam and the river is only 500 feet wide. This presents multiple challenges (subsurface utilities, uneven riverbed bottoms modifying flow pattterns over the dam, the required depth of sheetpiling and the length required would be many, many millions of dollars (a team of engineers is currently running FEM analysis of the flows to determine feasibility of placing a cofferdam in a labyrinth fashion).

Bypass pumping of this magnitude would be more expensive than the fix itself. Itbis easy for people to not comprehend the amount of water required to be moved. There is currently a bypass operation in place only to provide drinking water to VT pumps to the treatment plant. The volune being pumped is only 60CFS. On a slow, hot, summer day, the flows of this river are around 700-1000 cfs. Required passage for flood control is 30,000 CFS. Floods have seen flows reach up to 200k CFS. The current bypass operation is running $90k per month. Do the math and you see things are much more complicated than "just" doing this or that. If the water goes above the dam, it could erode the top, creating a chain reaction situation and wash out the entire dam.. not just the gates. This would be catastrophic.

And yes.. this break is the result of poor planning.

Dunlap and Mcqueeney will be fixed as the funds are being allocated via public / private partnerships, however the other lakes are smaller and dont have the populations and wealth on the other two, bigger lakes. It is a very complex and dynamic situation and there are many, many very smart people working towards creative solutions. One thing for sure is it will not happen fast regardless of the replacment option chosen.The report I posted above is pretty nformative and likely the best info publicly available at this time.

Typos compliments of my phone keyboard.

EDIT: "many" states that do.

Great information you sound like you are an engineer or have personal knowledge of the issue. I see you are from NB.

I think you are right about Dunlap and McQueeny for getting repaired like you said too much money at stake in those areas.

LDA yes it is a bummer!

[CrashCourse316]

It doesn't matter if the DOD (DOW) was buying marshmallows, it is still money they spent so it counts towards what they cost us as taxpayers.

I can't tell if your anti military or anti tax but I can tell you we are not buying marshmallows.....my experience of this during my deployment a few years ago was that we had a lot of ground gained and a lot of ordinance spent. also had a lot of civilians saved where I was at. If you think terrorism is bad in our country it's not even 1/2% of whats going on over there. The money is not just being dumped into a hole of made up civilian casualties and a growing number of terrorist organizations. the money being spent is proportionally reducing the threat of global terrorism and is shown on paper what was gained by our operations. not everything goes public in the news headlines though. like the week by week map of us going building to building in a city and cornering a large terror group into a single city block and having many surrender and the ones that chose to fight didn't last very long with no ordinance left for them. That was able to be done by systematically taking out their funding from over $70mil a month down to $<1mil over a 6 month period.

I'm not trying to change your views but just informing you a little more on some stuff that may affect your total opinion of what that spending actually does. I don't think anyone wants terrorist groups with that type of funding going around doing what they please.

Also I just had all my training days cut this year because they pulled funding from my entire base because they couldn't afford it. results, no one gets their annual training days the rest of this year. maybe they spent it on a dam...