GBRA: Your dam will fail

At separate meetings with members of the Preserve Lake Dunlap Association (PLDA) and Friends of Lake McQueeney Association, Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority (GBRA) management said they expect the Lake McQueeney dam to fail and that they do not have adequate funding to repair any of the dams that have already failed or are about to.

That message was delivered over a week ago by the GBRA to the Lake McQueeney group at a meeting at the Ski Lodge.

Jonathan Stimson of the GBRA told the Lake McQueeney group, “Your dam will fail.” The stunning announcement was followed up with information from GBRA that no funding is available to fix their dam when it fails, and that no funding is available to GBRA to repair the Lake Wood or Lake Dunlap dams.

In addition, the GBRA has told Friends of Lake Wood Association, PLDA and Lake McQueeney residents that there is no current plan in place to replace the dams, that engineering is only 30 percent complete on assessing how to fix the dams in the system, and the prognosis for dam replacement is not going to occur in the near term.

Joe Solansky, president of the Friends of Lake Wood Association, attended the meetings with PLDA and Lake McQueeney and informed their memberships that it would only take one bolt to fail and their dam would suffer the same fate as Lake Wood and Lake Dunlap.

At the Lake McQueeney meeting, attendees were told the dam is in a very dangerous condition as it currently sits. A contractor was hired to make some repairs to the dam but has since halted work on the dam due to the fear of dam failure.

Dave Burrough, J.R. Anderson, Carol Anderson and Ricky Kotwig Jr. of the Friends of Lake Wood attended one or both of the meetings with Lake Dunlap and Lake McQueeny residents. The general consensus of all three groups is one of outrage, despair and frustration.