Oktibbeha County will provide the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality with data on the county lake dam and a schedule to complete several studies by July 31, as requested by MDEQ at the county board of supervisors’ meeting on Monday.
The data requested includes an evaluation of the probable maximum flood if the dam were to breach, a survey to identify structure failures and a radar assessment of the emergency spillway, said William McKercher, the head of MDEQ’s dam safety division.
“These studies will be considered part of a multi-step process in order to successfully conduct a potential failure mode analysis and provide support for requests for construction funding,” McKercher said.
The lake showed early signs of breaching on Jan. 14, and it would have forced a mass evacuation of the neighborhoods surrounding it if the county’s emergency action hadn’t relieved enough pressure to keep the dam from breaking.
The lake’s structural issues go back decades, and MDEQ has been notifying the supervisors since 1985 that the emergency spillways are too small, the slopes on both sides of the levee are too steep and the box culvert under the County Lake Road bridge is cracking and coming apart, according to MDEQ and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers inspection reports.
To solve the issue, the county would have to completely remove the existing dam, build a new one with larger valves to control the water level and build a new emergency spillway and a temporary detour road below the levee — an $8 million project for which the lack of funding has been the main obstacle to replacement or repair.
Representatives from MDEQ and USACE assessed the dam’s condition in March and recommended that the county authorize a study to determine whether repair or reconstruction was the best option. The supervisors voted later in March to use county operating funds for County Engineer Clyde Pritchard to develop blueprints to replace the dam.
The county installed pumps and pipes in January to lower the lake’s water level to the point where crews could cut off the dam’s primary outlet valve at the beginning of April, which Pritchard said increased the flow of water out of the lake by four times.
McKercher said the county should submit a hydraulics evaluation report to MDEQ by May 22 to show evidence of how the removal of the valve has affected the lake’s storage capacity. Pritchard agreed to both the May and July deadlines.
Funding for the dam assessments and repairs might be available through the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s High Hazard Potential Dam Grant program, McKercher said.
“We’re required by FEMA to rank projects across the state and address the highest-risk projects first,” he said. “We’ll have to look at where Oktibbeha sits, but with what we’ve had this past year with the slide (that showed signs of breaching), it would be in a good position to receive funds for the assessment. In order to get funds for construction, these assessments certainly have to be completed and support the design criteria.”
District 3 Supervisor Marvell Howard, who lives just behind the lake levee, has been the board’s strongest advocate for securing funds to replace the dam. He again pushed for quick action on Monday, and he said rebuilding the dam is the only way to completely eliminate any potential risk of a breach.
“There’s always going to be a certain amount of guessing what you’ve got if you go ahead with patching this and that,” Howard said.
Other business
The supervisors unanimously voted to extend the countywide curfew, from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m., enacted at the April 6 meeting. The curfew was set to end today, but it will now last until May 18, the day of the board’s next meeting.
The board also voted unanimously to create and advertise for an information technology employee, an idea that board attorney Rob Roberson had during a discussion about billing for house-to-house garbage collection. The board voted in December to bill property owners instead of tenants for the service, but Howard said Monday that some property owners still receive bills of several thousand dollars because of tenants’ outstanding bills.
Roberson suggested the county impose an annual lien on properties with outstanding garbage bills, and he said an information technology employee could help the county keep track of issues like these.
“I think it would help y’all be able to keep up with things, and it would help our media outlets be able to pull things up,” he said. “We have got to catch up with the 21st century.”
Tess Vrbin was previously a reporter for The Dispatch.
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