BRAZOS COUNTY, Texas (KRHD) — The Brazos River stretches from Lake Whitney to the Bosque River in Central Texas and through the Brazos Valley, and it's all part of a larger system to reduce the risks of flooding in our communities.
"We respond to where the rain falls," said Tim Helms, Senior Water Manager for the Fort Worth District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Recent rainfall has added plenty of water to our region's reservoirs.
"If it rains in one particular basin, that water is going to flow down through multiple towns, through multiple counties," Helms said.
15 ABC asked Helms what are our lakes and rivers across Central Texas and the Brazos Valley are looking like now.
"We have all 9 of our Brazos River lakes at flood pool, which is quite rare. But they're not all that high and and they're all protecting and providing that flood risk management as they've been designed to do."
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers monitor and control parts of that flow for the Brazos River Basin.
"We'll typically have our gates closed off in the dam, so we're not contributing any flow downstream, and then [that] allows, once the levels in the river systems downstream have adequate capacity, then we'll start to release our floodwater that wouldn't contribute to any flow outside the banks, and that's all in accordance to a plan that we have for each reservoir," said Brian Phelps, Deputy Chief for Operations Division at the Fort Worth District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Those carefully coordinated plans are essential for making sure our region's water flows safely.
"Sometimes if it rains upstream, that water just flows freely into our reservoirs and we will store it if we're in drought conditions," Helms said. "If we're in flood conditions, we may release it downstream depending on what's happening downstream. So you know, we just collect the floodwater and then look downstream and decide what to do with it."
Helms told 15 ABC that each of the Brazos River lakes is fulfilling water supply purposes with an adequate conservation pool while also providing flood protection.
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