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Wife just texted from the house in Kingwood saying it's pitch black there and raining sideways.

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The dams are expected to crest tonight. But that doesn't mean instant catastrophic failure. Depending on where the dams crest and what sort of subsiding and shifting has happened means one or both could fail. They're owned by the Army Corps of Engineers and they have placed a designated class 1 rating which means "we needed to fix this **** yesterday". So that's not good. And with all that water and pressure a constant force, any imperfections will saturate and slowly weaken it.

At any rate this is a massive stress test for a dam that needs repair.

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Dam. That's scary.

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FIFY

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Dam. That's scary.

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FIFY

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what you did, I see it!

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The dams are expected to crest tonight. But that doesn't mean instant catastrophic failure. Depending on where the dams crest and what sort of subsiding and shifting has happened means one or both could fail. They're owned by the Army Corps of Engineers and they have placed a designated class 1 rating which means "we needed to fix this **** yesterday". So that's not good. And with all that water and pressure a constant force, any imperfections will saturate and slowly weaken it.

At any rate this is a massive stress test for a dam that needs repair.

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Two aging dams deemed "extremely high risk" by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are at record pooling levels in Houston's west side after this week's torrential rainfall, but are working well and have undergone improvements in recent years, authorities said Wednesday.

The dams at 50 percent capacity are classified as high risk only because they're about two decades beyond their life expectancy and in a populated area, said Corps spokeswoman Sandra Arnold.

However, a Corps report issued on the dams in 2012 offered more worrying criteria for the classification, noting that such structures are "critically near failure or at extremely high risk under normal operations."

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In the unlikely event that the dams collapse, downtown and the highly populated area in sprawling west Houston would likely see deaths as well as $60 billion in property damage, said Richard Long, a project operations managers with the Corps.

But the current conditions are no reason to panic, he added. Improvements done the last few years have shored up the 70-year-old structures and an ongoing $72 million construction project will greatly strengthen them.

"The dams are in good condition," he said. "We have 24-hour surveillance occurring."

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Long said it will take a long time to drain the reservoirs behind the Ad****s and Barker dams in controlled releases. There is about two months' worth of water to get rid of. Each dam held about 100,000 acre feet of water on Wednesday.

The dams were constructed in the mid-1940s to collect excessive amounts of rainfall. The water is released downstream at a controlled rate, preventing flooding in downtown Houston and other urban areas to the east.

A weather service statement says the water level in the Ad****s Reservoir was measured Wednesday night at 101.4 feet. It's expected to crest at 103.2 feet, far surpassing the previous record for the reservoir of 97.46 feet set in March 1992. The water in Barker Reservoir was 93.8 feet and expected to crest at 97.7 feet, exceeding the March 1992 record of 93.6 feet.

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The Corps of Engineers' recent improvements on the dams include additional filters to control seepage, additional lighting and emergency power "to have around the clock ability to operate the dams and to ensure their inspections and function when we get pools like we're having right now," Long said.

"From this one flood event ... the operations of (the dams) ... have prevented over $3 billion in damage downstream of these projects," he said.

Despite reassurances by the Corps on the integrity of the dams, there still remains a worry the structures might fail, said Jim Blackburn, a Houston environmental attorney who in 2011 filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Sierra Club related to reducing runoff into the two reservoirs.

"If we lose Ad****s and Barker, that will be absolutely catastrophic," he said. "And we should be doing as a community everything we can to protect them. They are the best flood control investments we have in this community."

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When the water surface elevation gets to 108 ft, start panicking. Just need another 3.5 billion cubic feet of water to get there (27 billion gallons).
http://waterdata.usgs.gov/tx/nwis/uv/?site_no=08073000

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So if they fail, is Spring Branch basically screwed?

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What happened to the rooster on the top?

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With the election this year, that could become the poster child for "America's crumbling infrastructure."

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Only if Texas was a swing state.

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