HANOVER, MD, March 27, 2015 -- The Association of State Dam Safety Officials (ASDSO), a national nonprofit organization serving state dam safety programs and the broader dam safety community, recently announced that it has awarded the Tarrant Regional Water District (TRWD) of Texas with the National Rehabilitation Project of the Year Award.
TRWD was recognized for its rehabilitation work on the Eagle Mountain Spillway Dam, located in the city of Fort Worth, Texas, which was completed in 2013. Eagle Mountain Lake is situated on the West Fork of the Trinity River. Owned and operated by TRWD, the lake functions to supply water to Fort Worth for municipal, industrial and irrigation uses, as well as for flood control and recreational uses.
The dam is 85 feet high and 4,800 feet wide, with an original spillway width of 1,300 feet. The drainage area of the West Fork of the Trinity River at Eagle Mountain Dam is 1,970 square miles. Construction of the dam began in 1930 and reached completion in 1932; impoundment of water then began in 1934. A new service spillway was added in 1971.
The ASDSO National Rehabilitation Project of the Year Award recognizes unique remedial designs that advance dam safety and reflect the professional engineering and construction standards that dam safety requires. The award is presented to the individual, company, agency, or organization whose project is judged to best represent those qualities from among the year's group of qualified nominees.
TRWD and Parsons Brinkerhoff engineers performed a complete checkup on the dam, which included examining data spanning through decades and collecting core samples, plus producing flood models. The District also added new instrumentation to help monitor conditions within the dam and contracted Hayward Baker Inc. (HBI), a national geotechnical contractor, to construct a cutoff wall by injecting grout to depths ranging from 45 to 93 feet throughout four different zones.
"This was a proactive effort to bring an aging dam up to current design standards," said Verreault, who has been collecting data and records on the Eagle Mountain Dam since the early 1990s. "What we found was that the 80-year-old dam is in excellent condition. The measures we implemented during this project provide reassurance the dam will perform as expected for another 50 to 80 years."
See also:
"New studies shed light on effects of dam removal on waterway landscapes"
"American Rivers reports 72 dam removals for 2014, sets goal to 75 for 2015"
###
