Arkansas Game and Fish commissioners gave the go-ahead April 23 to spend $1 million to begin work on repairing the spillway at Lake Elmdale near Springdale.
Once completed, Game and Fish will be eligible for reimbursement of approximately half of the project costs from the Federal Emergency Management Agency since the initial damage resulted from significant flooding in 2018. The project is a priority in order to repair an erosion problem on the spillway, said Kevin Mullen, chief of operations for Game and Fish.
The dam at Lake Elmdale is sound, Mullen said.
"The problem is just erosion on the downstream side of the dam. It started with a lot of the flooding. We wanted to get in front of this before it becomes something worse," he said.
"Hopefully we'll have construction going within 60 days," Mullen said. "With coronavirus and other revenue constraints now, we're really having to prioritize what we're moving forward on as far as high-revenue projects."
ETC Engineers and Architects Inc., based in Little Rock, is the environmental engineer for the project.
The engineering company found the runoff that reaches the lake is at a maximum level because of an increase in residential units, a new school and regular rainfall, Mullen said. That's what caused the scouring of the spillway. In the 1990s, the area around Lake Elmdale was forested and agricultural land. There have been at least three major floods at Elmdale since 2011 that coincided with these changes in landscape.
"There is no real ground saturation from rainfall," he noted. "All of it goes straight into the lake. There is nothing you can do about that. That's just one of those things that came with changes and growth and private development."
Jon Stein, Game and Fish district fisheries supervisor in Rogers, said Lake Elmdale has a good population of largemouth bass with huge numbers of smaller fish that need some harvest.
"We caught 400 largemouth bass per hour of electrofishing, and most were under 12 inches," Stein said. "Anglers can keep 10 largemouth bass per day, and the lake needs some of those small bass removed to help growth rates. Lake Elmdale also has good populations of big redear and bluegill sunfish, and fishing is good for these larger fish right now."
Sports on 05/12/2020