Eagle Mountain Spillway Project Named ASDSO Rehabilitation Project of the Year

The Tarrant Regional Water District (TRWD) was the 2014 recipient of the Association of State Dam Safety Officials (ASDSO) National Rehabilitation Project of the Year Award.

TRWD was recognized for its rehabilitation work on the Eagle Mountain Spillway Dam located in Fort Worth, Texas, which was completed in 2013. As the general contractor on the project, Hayward Baker Inc. (HBI) performed a grouting program to reduce seepage. 

Louie Verreault, TRWD’s dam and levee safety engineer, received the award during the ASDSO’s Conference Award banquet in San Diego.

Eagle Mountain Lake is situated on the West Fork of the Trinity River. Owned and operated by TRWD, the lake functions to supply water to Fort Worth for municipal, industrial and irrigation uses, as well as for flood control and for recreational uses. The dam is 85 ft high and 4,800 ft wide, with an original spillway width of 1,300 ft. The drainage area of the West Fork of the Trinity River at Eagle Mountain Dam is 1,970 sq miles. Construction of the dam began in 1930 and reached completion in 1932; impoundment of water then began in 1934. A new service spillway was added in 1971.

The ASDSO National Rehabilitation Project of the Year Award recognizes unique remedial designs that advance dam safety and reflect the professional engineering and construction standards that dam safety requires. The award is presented to the individual, company, agency or organization whose project is judged to best represent those qualities from among the year’s group of qualified nominees.

TRWD and Parsons Brinkerhoff engineers performed a complete checkup on the dam, which included examining data spanning through decades, collecting core samples, plus producing flood models. The district also added new instrumentation to help monitor conditions within the dam and contracted HBI to complete a grouting program to reduce seepage.

“This was a proactive effort to bring an aging dam up to current design standards,” said Verreault, who has been collecting data and records on the Eagle Mountain Dam since the early 1990s. “What we found was that the 80-year-old dam is in excellent condition. The measures we implemented during this project provide reassurance the dam will perform as expected for another 50 to 80 years.”

HBI was contracted to construct a cutoff wall by injecting grout to depths ranging from 45 to 93 ft throughout four different zones. HBI completed a series of onsite tests to verify that the program would achieve the specified maximum permeability of 10-6 cm per second.

“We faced several challenges during the project, which included the narrow work space on the crown of the dam and the need to accommodate vehicular traffic," said Art Pengelly, senior vice president for HBI. "Thanks to the efforts of the project team, which was led by Dan Bole and Billy Fisher of HBI, we successfully completed the project on schedule while achieving the required permeability reduction.”

Source: Hayward Baker Inc.