Diving into Water issues with Mayor Pro Tem
The City of Llano Council and staff understand that many of you may have questions and concerns about the status of our water situation. Please understand that we have been working in parallel paths to gain needed information, reach out to appropriate resources, evaluate the existing dam structure, and evaluate the flashboards that were used by the City in past years.

During the May 16th city council meeting, a small Water Planning Group was delegated to evaluate the City Dam and flashboard system for installation, look into a bathometric survey of both City Lake and Robinson Park Lake, and gather information to present to council about current and future situations and options. Prior to this May 16th meeting, weather and flow conditions were monitored. May 1st, the average flow rate of the Llano River in town was 66 cfs (cubic feet per second), and by May 15th the flow was already down to an average of 26 cfs. On May 24th, the river reached a low of 9 cfs before coming back up after a few little rains, and by June 1st the average flow was 22 cfs. Flow over the dam was 1-2 cfs around June 20th, and essentially stopped flowing by June 23rd. This streamflow information was gathered from the LCRA Hydromet web site for the Llano River at Llano gage. One should note that the gage reported zero before water quit flowing over the dam. This is due to the physical location of the gaging station downstream and where the water actually flows along the riverbed at very low levels.  

There are only a handful or so days over the last three to almost four months where the wind has not blown at all or when it was below 5-10 mph. The 100-degree days made an early arrival in May and have stuck around with little to no relief. Both of these factors on their own contribute to a certain amount of evaporation but put the two together for an extended period of time, and the evaporation rate is multiplied. There was a little rain at the end of May and then again at the end of June, but not enough to flush the river up.

On May 19th, the Water Planning group met to evaluate the existing anchors on top of City Dam for installation of the flashboards. Upon inspection, the existing stainless steel all-thread anchors were found to be in poor condition. The threads have been worn and abraded from past floods and continuous flow over the anchors. Many anchors were bent or broken from the flashboards being installed in the past and a flood came along. During the inspection, it was determined that new anchors would have to be installed if the existing brackets for the flashboards were going to be used. Robinson Park Dam was also inspected the same day to see if installing flashboards along this dam was an option. Portions of the top of Robinson Park Dam and both end abutment areas would need extensive work to make a flashboard system doable before any anchors could be set.

After the dam inspections, the existing angle iron brackets were inspected and the planning group began to put together a material list/cost estimate for installing the new anchors, utilizing what angle brackets were left, fabricating new brackets, and purchasing the boards. The material cost alone for all new stainless-steel anchor systems was going to be a minimum of about $25,000 for the same type of anchors previously used or a minimum of about $70,000 for imbedded internally threaded anchors. This did not include any boards or any additional steel for brackets that were damaged or lost during the last use. In addition to the cost, installing two rows of new anchors on 5-foot centers across the 755-foot long dam would be very labor intensive and costly.

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