By Karen Gleason
The 830 Times
County Judge Lewis G. Owens Jr. answered questions about Amistad Dam during Wednesday’s meeting of county commissioners court.
Owens gave an update on the dam, addressing concerns he has heard from county residents about the structure’s designation as a Level II (safety concern) by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers several years ago and plans to mitigate the effects of more than 50 sinkholes that have been identified near the structure. (See separate story.)
After the update, Owens told the audience members he would take some questions.
County Commissioner Pct. 4 Gustavo “Gus” Flores asked about the location of the sinkholes.
“The problem of the sinkholes will be fixed on the high land. The sinkholes are actually upriver from the dam, on the water side of the dam, down at the bottom, but the fixing of the problems will be up on top, in the roadway area. Once you leave the concrete, it’s about a mile-and-a-quarter, what they’ve identified, once they go in there and begin to drill, they’ll be able to mitigate the problem,” Owens said.
Kerr Wardlaw, a candidate for the County Commissioner Pct. 1 seat, who was in the audience, said, “There’s one thing to add, a lot of people get centered on fishing and water skiing on the lake, but the lake is there for irrigation downriver, and they forget that we are in an extreme drought, and that’s why the lake is down, and I hear it all around town, they think (the water level) is being lowered to repair the dam. It’s lowered because the water was used to irrigate.”
Owens said, “Again, we’ve been assured, and we’ve been told, that they will not drain the water, they will not lower the water, when the construction (to repair) the sinkholes starts. I don’t know how much clearer I can be on that. In the last three weeks, we’ve answered quite a few phone calls, about why is (the lake level) going down? That’s all the information I have.”
He said members of county commissioners court have also been invited to tour the dam on Aug. 20.
One woman in the audience, who manages a campground/RV park near the lake, said it as her understanding that years ago, the International Boundary and Water Commission released (water) from dams in the upper part of New Mexico and brought the water level up 25 feet in the Amistad Reservoir, and asked why that is not happening again.
“Who initiates that, for (water) to come to Amistad to flow back down?” she asked.
County Commissioner Pct. 3 Beau Nettleton responded, “There was actually a dam on the Mexico side that broke, and we received all the water. It was not intentional, and they’d had a lot of floods in the mountains (in Mexico), and the dam had actually collapsed and sent the water down here, otherwise we would have not had that water,” Nettleton responded.
Owens added, “The Mexican government, from everything that I’ve been reading, has until October 2025 to pay us the water that they owe us. It’s not going to happen. It’s just not going to happen.”
County resident Lionel Reyes also asked, “On the dam. Would the commissioners court possibly contact all these agencies and have a round table meeting with the citizens, somewhere?”
“We are going to have a meeting with the city of Del Rio, and people from Eagle Pass and stuff like that, and we’re going to set that up and that will be part of the process during our emergency mitigation plan,” Owens replied.
He reiterated that a report the county had received from the IBWC about the dam will be posted on the county’s website.
The writer can be reached at delriomagnoliafan@gmail.com.
