Civil Engineering Magazine Gives Update on Lake Ralph Hall
Civil Engineering magazine in December provided a progress report on Lake Ralph Hall, a new Texas reservoir and water source for which Freese and Nichols is designer for the Leon Hurse Dam along with a raw water intake and pump station. Freese and Nichols teams also have provided a range of other services to support the project.
Lake Ralph Hall, owned by the Upper Trinity Regional Water District, broke ground in July 2021. It’s estimated that the reservoir will provide residents of Denton, Collin and Fannin counties in North Texas with about 39,000 acre-feet of new water supply starting in 2026.
The Leon Hurse Dam will be a 2.3-mile-long, 108-foot-tall zoned earthen embankment dam that forms the new lake. The $160 million facility includes a new 705-foot-long, 104-foot-tall roller compacted concrete (RCC) and cast-in-place (CIP) concrete spillway with a 120-foot-wide labyrinth weir overflow section, a new 1,700-foot-wide excavated earthen emergency spillway, a new pump station intake and low flow outlet structure with nine 7-foot-by-7-foot sluice gates.
The raw water intake and pump station facilities are still being designed. The pump station is being designed for an initial capacity of 55 MGD, with the ability for expansion to 80 MGD.
The dam is located near the City of Ladonia in Fannin County. The project is Texas’ second major new reservoir constructed in the past 30 years, after Bois d’Arc Lake, a North Texas Municipal Water District project expected to start delivering water in 2022.
Read “New Texas reservoir is decades in the making” in Civil Engineering, the magazine of the American Society of Civil Engineers.