LIVINGSTON, Texas – A London-based company has spotted what they’ve described as “significant deformation” at the Lake Livingston Dam in Livingston, Texas.
KPRC 2 reporter Gage Goulding has been closely following developments at the Lake Livingston Dam starting on June 28 when the Trinity River Authority (TRA) which oversees Lake Livingston said the dam was being watched for a ‘potential failure.
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Crews discovered the spillway had been “adversely impacted by the recent heavy rainfall and flooding,” according to a release shared with KPRC 2.
They saw one problem is erosion around a wall that’s used to guide water away from the dam. The TRA says the lake could be lowered as much as three feet to help crews that are working to make repairs.
A company based in London, Value.Space, saw this news, and decided to look at Lake Livingston pro bono to see what was going on.
Reijo Pold is one of the founders of Value.Space. They provide satellite-based risk assessments on a variety of structures, including dams. He also shared their analysis, conducted over the past three years, with KPRC 2, highlighting five areas of movement that stood out on the dam slope and spillway.
“Two of them are significant, “Pold said.
A 350-foot-long section on the west side of the dam’s spillway has ‘significant deformation’, indicating a weakness in the dam’s structure.
Value.Space saw a similar problem on the east side of the spillway.
These areas are sinking at a rate of 0.22-0.55 inches per year, which is accelerated movement according to Pold.
“I would definitely speak to the engineers and see what’s going on and what’s being done about it, because on the spillway itself, we saw that there was three times the acceleration from September 2023 till today. So, three times acceleration of movement,” Pold shared.
Pold cautions that there are 90,000 dams in the United States, and since the 1980′s there have been 24 dam failures per year on average.
He hopes that the analysis from Value.Space can prevent a dam failure in Lake Livingston before it happens.
“It’s not really a question, if the next failure event will occur, it’s really a question of when and where.”