Although the dam in the Longleaf Acres subdivision in Petal is functioning fine, members of the Forrest County Board of Supervisors are looking over options to either raise the dam, lower the spillway or lower the water level in the lake in the face of new regulations from the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality.
The board recently approved a payment of $3,408.38 to Hattiesburg firm Shows, Dearman & Waits to draw up a flood inundation map and look at ways to minimize the effects in case of dam failure. After their studies, engineers will recommend to supervisors which option to take.
“The guidelines are based strictly off the amount of water inside the dam – it’s classified as a high-hazard dam under a new classification system,” board president David Hogan said. “They completed the (flood inundation map) and in fact, it would affect 12 residences downstream in the event that the dam failed for some reason.
“It’s either going to be raise the dam up, or lower the water level, or rebuild the spillway to lower the water level. So the engineers are going to come up with different scenarios along those lines … so that in the event of a breach, it would have less impact on the area residents.”
Most likely, the solution will be to lower the water level of the lake and lower the emergency spillway.
“I think they said it’d take over 40 inches of rain to be a threat,” Hogan said. “Which that’s what Houston got in (Hurricane Harvey) – it’s not like it’s impossible, but it’s highly unlikely that one weather event is going to create over 40 inches of rain.
“But we’re going to do our best to prepare for that.”
Forrest County District 3 Supervisor Burkett Ross said there’s no set timeline for the engineers to finish their studies.
“They’re working on it, and whenever they come up with the recommendation, they’ll present that, and when we get that done I’m sure we’ll be in compliance and won’t have any more problems,” he said. “We certainly want to keep (the dam) open – there’s a lot of kids that play there, and people fish down there a lot.
“It’s a nice area, and we want to keep it like that. We’re going to do whatever we have to, to make sure that we do.”
Hogan said he wanted to stress that there’s no problem with the dam as it is.
“It’s strictly a designation because of the water volume amount,” he said. “I want to say that dam has over 25 acres of water.
“There is no current threat or danger of dam failure or anything else. Once we get the information back from the engineers, and the cost associated with it, the board will make a decision on how best to move forward.”
