These Dams Needed Replacing 15 Years Ago. Now Texas Will Drain Four Lakes Instead — Causing Other Problems.

concrete dock.

“A friend of mine lost his whole wall. It just went ‘woosh’ down over there. It was a brand new wall,” Croan said.

Other homes are likely to experience similar problems if the dams aren’t fixed soon, area real estate agents said.

Lack of funding for repairs is largely to blame. Because the dams aren’t use for flood control, the river authority isn’t eligible for state funding to maintain them and has struggled for decades to scrape together the cash to do so. (The Guadalupe River Valley dams don’t produce enough electricity to be self-sustaining.)

As a result, river authority officials have done just enough maintenance on the dams to ensure they function, but it hasn’t been enough to prevent floodgate collapses on Lake Wood in 2016 and Lake Dunlap in May. After the second dam failure, Gonzales said, the river authority scrambled to figure out its options.

Damage and flooding from the first two floodgate collapses was minimal, but with four dams left, officials are worried further failures could flood neighborhoods and put people on or near the lakes in danger.

Residents say they recognize the need to replace the dams, estimates for which range from $70 million to $180 million, and that the river authority lacks the money to do it. But Tess Coody, who lives near Lake McQueeney and has helped organize community efforts to stop the river authority from draining the lakes, said most people don’t trust that the dams won’t simply be abandoned after they are lowered, especially since river authority officials knew for years that the dams had exceeded their expected lifespans.

Coody said she also felt the river authority’s last-minute decision to lower the floodgates doesn’t take into account the widespread impact it will have, includingdecreased property values that could hurt school districts or damage lake ecosystems.

Some estimates show the region potentially losing millions of dollars in property value, sharply cutting into the budgets for theNavarro and Seguin school districts, according to appraisers and real estate agents in the region. But right now, appraisers are trying to avoid the area because of the potential, but not surefire, chance of the lake draining.

Many appraisers don’t want “to take that kind of a risk on something we have no way to prove,” said Doug Hendricks, an appraiser who has worked in the area for decades and owns Hendricks Appraisal Services. He added that any appraisal would have to include acknowledgement