An effort to bolster flood control in northeast Houston through improvements to the Lake Houston dam have been scaled back due to financial constraints on the project. Houston officials say that the length of proposed floodgates will need to be reduced by half to meet the project’s budget.
To remediate seismic safety issues and enhance flood-handling capacity at the concrete thin-arch dam, the $32-million project called for cutting a notch in the existing structure, placing a new ogee-shaped spillway and installing reinforced armor at the dam’s base.
While the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) approved $205 million in federal funds to reimburse California for costs to reconstruct the Oroville Dam spillways damaged by 2017 flooding, it declined to pay the remaining $306 million that the state’s Dept. of Water Resources (DWR) had requested.
A mix of brute force and cutting-edge technology enabled contractors to replace a large portion of Oroville Dam’s spillway chute in just 165 days, meeting a Nov. 1 deadline set in anticipation of the start of northern California’s winter rainy season.