We have a 45 acre community lake that is about 300 acre feet at normal pool.

Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) regulates dams in the state. If you break their threashold (https://www.tceq.texas.gov/assets/public/compliance/field_ops/damsafety/DamSafetyGuidance090113.pdf) they will be around to inspect your dam. We are just over the threashold of 500 acre feet at maximum (top of dam). Based on a required engineering study, our spillway is inadequte to contain a 50% maximum flood event. Now TCEQ defines a maximum flood event as 48 inches of rain in 6 hours. Think about that for a minute. Hurrican Harvey produced 60 inches, but it was over 4 days. The engineering study computed that our 40 foot spillway would need to be 170 feet wide to handle this rain event. That is wider than our dam. Since we can't create a spillway that wide, and we can't raise the dam 7 or 8 feet, our only solution is to armour the dam. This entails stripping all the vegetation from the dry side and installing engineered soil retaining mats anchored into the dam, replacing the top soil, and reseeding. All in about $120,000 project plus $6000 for engineering studies.

Ross Canant