Can a lake flood?
As far as I know, there is precisely 1 natural lake in Texas (Caddo, in East Texas, formed by a natural log jam, then dammed). All the rest are manmade.
It’s been an extraordinarily rainy spring this year, and the Army Corps of Engineers (who control manmade lakes in Texas and many other states) has so far been loathe to open the dams up. After all, all the Texas lakes are really reservoirs: we drink that water, brush our teeth, bathe, wash our clothes with that water.
Back in mid May, 2021, my darling wife, mother, and I went out to our spot at Grapevine Lake, only to find the curved tree partly submerged, the path under it along the shore impassable.
My wife and I went back just last weekend, after a couple more weeks of rain, and found that we could barely get off the parking pad. The lake is up about 6 or 7 feet from it’s regular point all of last year.
I wonder how long the water will stay there, how long it will take whoever drinks Grapevine lake water (not the residents of Grapevine, surely, or not entirely anyway… probably Fort Worth mostly) to drink down 7 feet of water.
It rained like this back in 2016 or so, and Irving let many of its parks along the Trinity River flood… It took 2 years for us to drink down that water and it was only a few inches.
This year, one of the parks that was underwater back then remains largely open, if a bit waterlogged, probably (partly) because the dams upstream remain closed.
And it keeps raining: an hour or two of medium to heavy rain early in the morning, followed by warm sun and oppressive humidity. (Better oppressive humidity than continued rain… We’ve already had to put in another French drain to keep the south side of the house from floating away.) It’s a strange late spring, so far. Our trees seem to be enjoying it, and they’re mostly thriving after the harsh, week-long cold snap that we barely survived earlier this year, but I still worry some.
Climate Change is real, and I worry some.
