Mother Nature may have saved the City of Greenville a lot of money, at least temporarily.
Recent rains have raised the water level on Lake Tawakoni enough to where the city is again able to utilize its intake on the reservoir. City Manager Massoud Ebrahim said a plan to dredge a new channel around the intake, which had been left high and dry due to the extended drought, has been put on hold for the moment.
“We know this might not last for a long time,” Ebrahim said. “We are aware that this might come back again.”
Ebrahim and the Greenville City Council had reviewed a range of options for how to address the drought issue on Lake Tawakoni, which had left the intake on the lake is unusable due to the receding water line and years of silt build-up.
The preferred option had called for dredging out the river channel and replacing old equipment at the existing pump station, a process which could take up to two years to implement and cost approximately $6 million.
“We had received a proposal from our engineers on the dredging,” Ebrahim said, noting he had intended to present it to the council at next week’s meeting.
But weeks of rain, snow, sleet and more have raised the level on the lake by more than four feet in the past month.
“Right now, the water goes into our intake,” Ebrahim said. “We have also removed the two auxiliary pumps.”
The city began renting two new pumps at Tawakoni in December, at a cost of $8,000 per month. The temporary pumps require additional personnel to run, and operating the equipment causes damage and wear and tear on the permanent pumps at the intake structure. As such the temporary pumps were expected to cost the city $400,000 in the coming year.
The water level on Lake Tawakoni as of Thursday was reported to be 430.57 feet, and the lake was about 73 percent full. While the lake was still about seven feet below the spillway, Ebrahim said the water level was high enough to where the dredging operation was no longer an emergency concern.
“At the same time we are in discussions and negotiations with the Sabine River Authority on other issues,” Ebrahim explained. “We are going to wait and see for a while before we decide on the engineering for the dredging.”
Once undertaken, the dredging effort would remove approximately 50 years of silt from around the intake structure and is expected to be good for 20 years.
Ebrahim said should the situation take a turn for the worse in the months ahead, the contract for the dredging “is basically ready to go.”