Yesterday, 11/8/2018, the final open floodgate, of the 4 that were open to help control the historic flood I wrote about above, closed.
Flood operations on Lake Travis ended roughly 6 days short of 2 full months of continuous flood control operations. While some people would argue with me, mainly those who built in the flood overflow areas of the lakes, we got off pretty light.
There was a bridge on Ranch Road 2900 over the Llano river, it was designed to withstand a 50 year flood. This one was historic, maybe a 1000 year flood. A local news crew was filming a “look at all the water and debris in the Llano River” segment with that bridge in view behind the reporters left shoulder when the bridge went away. It went from the “Wow! Look at the water to a WOW!!!!! The BRIDGE JUST WASHED AWAY!!!!” segment.
Basically, the two flood control dams did what they were designed to do, fill up, over fill into the flood areas, and release the water slower than the flood would. It did cause the rivers and constant volume lakes to have flood water in the more common flood areas but it did not get as bad as it has in the past. So the people who had boats and structures in those areas lost stuff.
The City of Austin was lucky in that the rains did not fall much on the Onion Creek floodplain, NOR on the Shoal creek area in Austin. SO the City itself did not have flood issues like it has in the past.