Dam Failures Show Harsh Reality of Aging Infrastructure

NEW BRAUNFELS, Texas—On a sunny May morning four years ago, J Harmon was rousted out of bed by an emergency call: A 90-year-old dam near his home had failed, sending a torrent of water downstream and emptying the lake where he lived.

That afternoon, he got a second shock when he learned there was no money to fix it. The state entity that oversaw six aging dams on the Guadalupe River couldn’t afford to rebuild them. One, the Wood Lake dam, had already failed in 2016, and two others had stopped working since 2019.

So Harmon decided to organize a campaign among affected property owners to rebuild the dam and save his community on Lake Dunlap—blazing a trail for other lakes downstream. Over the next four years, Harmon’s group set up a special taxing district for lakefront homeowners and partnered with the local river authority, which hired a contractor to build a new $40 million dam, and used revenue from hydroelectric power to help pay the debt.

“It’s not just a bunch of hillbilly bumpkins” that made this happen, Harmon, a retired 66-year-old home builder, said on a recent day as he stood below the newly rebuilt dam, which is expected to begin refilling Lake Dunlap later this month. “Although when we first started, we did not know what we were doing—I’ll be the first to admit that.” 

More Americans might have to become dam experts in coming years as small dams around the country reach the end of their lives, putting countless people and the fate of entire communities at risk.

The average age of the 91,815 dams in the U.S. is 61 years, according to an inventory maintained by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The number of dams that could lead to a loss of life if they failed has grown by about 20% to 16,000 over the last 10 years, according to a February report from the Association of State Dam Safety Officials. The report put the cost of needed repairs for dams not owned by the federal government at $157.5 billion.

While many people think of the giant federally built structures in the West when they picture dams, most are actually more modest projects, like the ones on the Guadalupe River, which were initially built by private developers before they were taken over by a state district.

“There’s nothing unusual about having communities grow up around a lake that depends on infrastructure many, many decades old, where you kind of don’t think about it—you just think about the lake,” said Robert Gilbert, chairman of the department of civil, architectural and environmental engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. 

The Lake Dunlap dam and five others on the Guadalupe were built in the late 1920s and 1930s to provide hydroelectric power for the rural communities in the area. The state of Texas took them over in the 1960s and sells their power through the Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority. The dams don’t generate enough electricity to fund a major rebuilding effort, said Darrell Nichols,

“The function of these lakes has changed from what was lakes that were impounded for electric generation, to now being impounded for recreational use,” he said. 

That left financing the project largely up to the homeowners on the lake. Just a few days after the collapse, Harmon called a meeting of the Preserve Lake Dunlap Association, a pre-existing group he headed, and circulated a piece of paper asking everyone to write down their name and phone number and any skills they had that could help. 

It took about a year to settle on a plan to move forward including hammering out a deal in which the river authority contributed electric revenue to help pay off the debt, helped secure low-interest financing and covered the costs of designing the new dam, Harmon said. It took another year to win over the community to set up a taxing district and two more to complete construction.

One key decision was to seek to tax only people whose properties directly touched the water. “If you try to go across the street, the first thing people will ask is, ‘What about the guy behind me?’” he said.

Larry Johnson, a 72-year-old former college president who was recruited by Harmon early on, became a key organizer. “It was the middle of Covid, we couldn’t even have a meeting,” Johnson said. “How could you get 612 homeowners to get on the same page?”

They divided the lakefront into 22 neighborhoods and appointed captains of each. “We had this joke of BYO lawnchair. All the meetings were outside,” he said. “You can’t get more grassroots than that.”  

Meanwhile, other lakes were also wrestling with what to do. One dam south on Lake McQueeney, the failure at Dunlap was a wake-up call. 

“It had been a little bit of a topic of discussion but nobody thought it was going to fail” until Dunlap went down, said Paul Mueller,

Now, the McQueeney dam, which has yet to fail, and the one at Lake Placid, which became stuck in the down position in 2021, have just begun two-year rebuilding projects, using the funding plan at Lake Dunlap as a model. A community group is considering its options to repair the dam below Lake Placid, said Nichols of the river authority, but the final two dams are unlikely to be rebuilt because they don’t have a strong enough tax base.

Mueller’s cousin Kipp Mueller, 57, runs the Lake Breeze Ski Lodge, a private club where boats can drive right up to the restaurant when Lake McQueeney is full. The place is normally hopping seven days a week all summer, with an amateur water-ski show every Thursday, Kipp Mueller said. These days, the dwindling lake, which was drained a few months ago, seems far away across an expanse of grass, and the water-ski show is a shadow of its former self, he said. 

Business is down about 50% this summer, Mueller said.

“We’ll be fine,” he said. “We have to get the dams fixed.”

Write to Joe Barrett at [email protected]