Is a major overhaul coming for the Lake Granbury gates?

The 16 Tainter gates at DeCordova Bend Dam have been in service since 1969. Tune in as we discuss how it’s holding up after all this time, and what the future may hold.

Unpacking the Brazos River is a podcast by the Brazos River Authority. 

 

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Check out this article about different types of dams.

Host: Charlie L. Shugart, BRA assistant public information officer.

Guests: Lacey Darr, BRA project manager, and Wesley Williams, BRA project engineer

Intro music: Clay Sellers, BRA lab analyst. 

 

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The Brazos River Authority was created by the Texas Legislature in 1929 and was the first state agency in the United States created specifically for the purpose of developing and managing the water resources of an entire river basin. Today, the BRA's staff of 284 develop and distribute water supplies, provide water and wastewater treatment, monitor water quality, and pursue water conservation through public education programs. Although the Brazos River Authority is an agency of the State of Texas, it does not levy or collect taxes. Except for occasional governmental grants to help pay the costs of specific projects, the BRA is entirely self-supporting. The BRA maintains and operates its reservoirs and treatment systems using revenues from the customers it serves.
 
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Creators and Guests

Host

Charlie L. Shugart

BRA assistant public information officer

Guest

Lacey Darr

Project Manager

Guest

Wesley Williams

Project Engineer

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Charlie L Shugart: How many dam problems can a 60-year-old dam have? DeCordova Bend Dam over on Lake Granbury is an absolute icon. She's just reaching her “needs a solid skin care routine” phase. Keeping this important infrastructure safe and running smoothly is 0% autopilot and 100% relentless complex engineering. This multifaceted structure quietly shapes and sustains daily life for so many people and businesses, ensuring a vital ongoing water supply. Today, we're diving into a major project at the dam with two awesome people in the midst of it all. I'm Charlie Shugart, and this is Unpacking the Brazos River. Joining me for the first time are Lacey Darr, a project manager here with the BRA, and Wesley Williams, a project engineer with the BRA. Welcome to the pod, you guys.

Wesley Williams: Thanks.

Lacey Darr: Thanks for having us.

Charlie L. Shugart: Since this is y'all's first time on the podcast, why don't y’all give everybody a little background on your history with the organization?

Lacey Darr: Sure. I have been with BRA for five and a half years, and I've served as a project manager since 2022.

Charlie L Shugart: Awesome. Great. Thanks for being here.

Wesley Williams: Yeah. So, I've been with the BRA a little over five years. I actually started here as an intern back in 2019 in water services.

Charlie L Shugart: Amazing.

Wesley Williams: And then got hired back on as a project engineer in 2021.

Charlie L Shugart: Great. So, when people think about our organization, their definition of what we do varies significantly on how they interact with us. So, we own and operate one water treatment facility near Lake Granger called the East Williamson County Regional Water Treatment System, and that provides treated water to the cities of Taylor and others. We operate a good amount of wastewater treatment plants for different cities, such as Temple and Clute. We have an environmental team that monitors tributaries and rivers, making sure we don't have any impairments throughout the basin.
And we provide water throughout the basin through a series of 11 reservoirs. And then, of course, we have three water supply reservoirs that we own and operate. And as part of all of those efforts, we have projects to help keep everything running. Lacey and Wesley were kind enough to come in today to talk about one of those projects. It's an important one at Lake Granbury's DeCordova Bend Dam. So, before we launch too much into that project, tell our listeners a little about Lake Granbury and the DeCordova Bend Dam, so they've got a little background on what that looks like.

Lacey Darr: Sure. DeCordova Bend Dam was constructed in 1969 to form Lake Granbury, which is a critical gated spillway facility. There are 16 Tainter gates. Each gate is 35 feet tall and 36 feet wide and associated hoisting systems that are relied on to pass flood flows and support reservoir operations.

Charlie L Shugart: Okay, so she's technically 57. I aged her a bit. Talk to us about her purpose.

Lacey Darr: The purpose of the reservoir is to be a source of water supply. There's no flood storage capacity.

Charlie L Shugart: What's that mean?

Lacey Darr: So that means when the lake is full, there's only about three inches between the top of the gates and the top of the water. For comparison's sake, a Corps of Engineers' reservoir does have flood storage. Those lakes have several feet between the top of the gates and the top of the water when they're full.

Wesley Williams: Yeah. And then I'll just add on to that. So, DeCordova Bend Dam is a slab-and-buttress type dam, sometimes called an Ambursen Dam. That was the original designer. So rather than relying on like a giant concrete block of weight, holding back the water, it relies on these buttresses staggered periodically across the dam, and it's got a thin face as opposed to like very thick. It's got a thin face, or the way the forces work, it goes through this thin face into the buttresses and then down into the foundation.

Charlie L Shugart: Okay.

Wesley Williams: So, it's not relying on weight, it's more of a force distribution down to the foundation.

Charlie L Shugart: Okay, gotcha. So instead of just building a giant heavy chunk of concrete and letting gravity do the work, it's all about clever engineering channeling that water pressure. Okay. Okay. And I believe I heard you say it was called a Tainter Gate?

Lacey Darr: Yes. Tainter Gate. That's right.

Charlie L Shugart: That's an interesting name. Does it mean anything?

Lacey Darr: It does. The name Tainter originates from a fellow by the name of Jeremiah Burnham Tainter, for whom the Tainter gate is historically named. In 1886, he redesigned a basic version of an existing patent for a lumber mill he was working for in Wisconsin. The first Tainter gates were mostly made from wood, and the true inventor was Thomas Parker, who received the original patent in 1880.

Charlie L Shugart: You touched on this briefly, but there is more to a dam than the gates itself. Talk to us a little bit about that. What makes up a dam?

Wesley Williams: Yeah. So related to the gates that Lacey just talked about is the spillway. Okay. So, the spillway provides a controlled path for the water to safely leave the reservoir. Right? So, the gates sit within that system and it allows us to control how much water is released. Then outside the spillway section, we have the embankment. Okay. There's about 1,300 feet of embankment that makes up DeCordova Bend Dam. This is essentially just a large, engineered mound of like rock and soil, and that fills the remaining links that hold back the water. So, these two sections are designed to work with each other. You have the embankment and then the concrete section, and then the rest of the embankment on the other side.

Charlie L Shugart: So, you mentioned the water going through the gates. How does that differ from the water passing through the spillway?

Wesley Williams: So, you have the spillway, and then the gates are just a portion of the spillway. So, it opens, it goes through the spillway. It's called an OG crest. It's a little technical, but it's basically just a path for the water to go down.

Charlie L Shugart: Yeah. So, it's not like two separate things.

Wesley Williams: No. It's just the gate is part of the spillway section.

Charlie L Shugart: Okay. Got it. I'm on the same page.

Wesley Williams: Okay. So, we have the gate section. Right? And then at DeCordova Bend Dam, we have the low flow section as well. So that is it has sluice gates instead of Tainter gates. It's basically just like a steel plate that goes up and down instead of a Tainter gate where it's like an arc and it goes along a radius falling.

Charlie L Shugart: Yeah. Up and down versus an arc radius. Got it.

Wesley Williams: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So, it has sluice gates on the upstream side, and that lets water into the wells in the low flow section. And then once the wells are full, we can release water through some outlet gates on the downstream side. And so, the low flow section, we mainly just use that for environmental flows. The most water we can release out of the low flow section is, like, 2,500 cubic feet per second.

Charlie L Shugart: Okay.

Wesley Williams: Whereas the Tainter Gates, I think we have, like, one gate fully open, is, like, 23,700 cubic feet per second.

Charlie L Shugart: Yeah. So big difference.

Wesley Williams: Yeah.

Charlie L Shugart: So, we have about 23,700 cubic feet per second that can flow through one fully open Tainter gate at the dam, and then we have about 2,500 cubic feet per second that can flow through the low flow gates, hence their name. And as just a reminder for our listeners, unlike Possum Kingdom Lake's Morris Shepherd Dam, the Decordova Bend Dam gates can be opened incrementally. So, we wouldn't go from zero to 23,700 cubic feet per second. At Lake Granbury, anything under a 5,000 cubic feet per second release is considered regular operations, and anything higher is considered a flood release.

Wesley Williams: And then underneath all of that is the foundation, right? And simply that's just, you know, supporting the dam, it helps resist the forces created by the head of the reservoir.

Charlie L Shugart: You mentioned a little bit about how these gates, this dam doesn't perform a flood control purpose. Is it because of the way that they're designed for that?

Wesley Williams: You know, that was not the design intent. We have no extra room.

Charlie L. Shugart: Right.

Wesley Williams: Like Lacey said, you know, the top of the water, only a three-inch difference between the top of the gate.

Charlie L Shugart: Which feels very small.

Wesley Williams: It's very small, and we'll get to it, but that's kind of part of this project is we're going to try and give us a little additional room so we're preventing splash over and causing, well, one for us to lose water, but the main problem is that it kind of gets on the backside of the gate and creates some corrosion issues.

Charlie L Shugart: Cool. Alright. Do all the BRA reservoirs have Tainter gates, or is that just Lake Granbury?

Lacey Darr: No. There are other types of gates. One of our other facilities, Morris Shepherd Dam at Possum Kingdom Lake, has what are known as bear trap gates. Those gates come with a whole set of challenges of their own, but the staff up there at PK do a fantastic job of keeping them functional and operating like they should.

Charlie L Shugart: Yeah. And I need to sit down for an episode and visit with some of the Possum Kingdom Lake staff to talk about how those bear trap gates, which are also called steel roof weir gates, how they work, I think our listeners would find it pretty interesting because, I mean, it is interesting. Well, okay, let's talk a little bit about this project. Tell us what it is that y'all are working on.

Lacey Darr: Yeah, we're actually just now beginning Phase 2 of 3 of the project. Phase 1 focused on a comprehensive evaluation of the 16 Tainter gates and all the associated components and equipment necessary to operate and support the gates. Phase 2 will evaluate both rehabilitation of the existing Tainter gates and a full replacement as sustainable long-term strategies. The BRA elected to develop both options of either rehab or replacement up to 30% design, and then compare cost, constructability, risk, and long-term performance before committing to a preferred path forward.

Charlie L Shugart: Yeah, okay. We went and looked at the options to determine what would be best for us.

Wesley Williams: I have nothing to add to that.

Charlie L Shugart: Yeah. So, what triggered the evaluation?

Wesley Williams: Yeah, so the last recoating we did on these gates was in 2009.

Charlie L Shugart: And explain to everybody what a recoating is.

Wesley Williams: So, there's a protective coating, kind of think paint, I guess, on the steel gates to help prevent corrosion and deterioration from the UV rays and all that stuff. They get wet, and they get dry on the backside. And then the upstream side, you know, they're pretty much mostly wet. You have a top section that, you know, goes through wet and dry cycles and stuff. And so that can just create a lot of corrosion issues.

Charlie L. Shugart: Okay.

Wesley Williams: And so, every 15 years, give or take, you just have to recoat. That's just kind of how things work. And so, we're kind of due for that. We were also, or the lake staff were also wanting some access improvements to the back of the gates to make, you know, inspections and maintenance safer, quicker. There was also a desire to add extra freeboard, I mentioned that earlier, to the top of the gates to help prevent the splash over. Right? And as we've discussed before, that, you know, just creates corrosion down the length of the arms of the gates.

Charlie L. Shugart: Okay.

Wesley Williams: And then all of that is coated, but still, you know, the wet-dry cycles, it just really eats at that coating.

Charlie L Shugart: Yeah. Totally. Constant moisture and sun will remove just about anything over time.

Wesley Williams: With those goals in mind, we knew that at least the hoist system was going to be impacted by, you know, adding additional weight to the gates through the platforms and the extra freeboard. We didn't want to do any major work on the gates if they were nearing the end of their useful life. Right? Because if you do that and then, you know …

Charlie L Shugart: Then have to replace them.

Wesley Williams: … five years, ten years down the line, you have to replace it, you kind of waste your time.

Charlie L Shugart: Yeah, absolutely.

Wesley Williams: So, we decided to do a facility-wide rehab or a facility-wide condition assessment just to establish kind of what work we could feasibly do and not have to replace it, you know, shortly after.

Charlie L Shugart: Yeah. Absolutely. Smart play.

Wesley Williams: But we wanted to make sure that if we go the replacement route, we didn't have to …

Charlie L Shugart: If we don't have to replace them yet, then we would rather postpone that till later. I imagine the cost is much more significant than doing rehab.

Wesley Williams: Yes. Yes. And if we replace the gates, we'll still do the improvements.

Charlie L Shugart: Yeah. That makes sense.

Wesley Williams: Yeah.

Charlie L. Shugart: Okay. So, are these gates original to the dam?

Wesley Williams: Yes.

Charlie L Shugart: You mentioned the term “useful life.” So, for our non-engineer listeners and me, what do you actually mean by that when you're talking about these almost 60-year-old gates?

Wesley Williams: I mean, you can keep replacing things and repairing things, but eventually it's probably just cheaper to go ahead and replace it, right? Kind of like an old car. At some point, you know, you can keep fixing it, but at some point, you probably just want to get the new car, right?

Charlie L. Shugart: Yeah.

Wesley Williams: So, kind of same thing. They’re almost 60 years old at this point. I mean, they've been performing well. There are no major issues that we've found. But there is some coating loss. There's some section loss of the gate. It's not major. You know, it's getting 60 years, give or take, we're getting to that time where we need to start considering, hey, do we replace these things?

Charlie L Shugart: Well, at this point, has there been any unexpected surprises throughout the project in terms of evaluating what the dam looks like?

Wesley Williams: Yeah. So, anything this old, right, when you start looking around, you never really know what you might find. Kind of like, you know, an old house or an old car. When you get in to do one thing, you start looking around, you might find …

Charlie L Shugart: 12 other things.

Wesley Williams: Exactly. Exactly. So as part of the Phase 1 work, we did some gate testing. We found that some of the trunnions had a highly effective friction factor.

Charlie L Shugart: Some of the what?

Wesley Williams: The trunnions. So, I wish I had a picture of the gate.

Charlie L Shugart: You’re going to have to verbalize.

Wesley Williams: Yeah. Yeah. So, you can imagine the skin plate or the arched portion of the gate, right? And then it goes back to trunnion arms, and then you have trunnion pins at kind of where it rotates, the rotation part. So that has a friction associated with it from, you know, wear of the metal, from potential misalignments, from the side seals of the gates, and some other things. Right? So that friction can get too high based on corrosion or whatever else. And so, we noticed that on some of the gates the friction was kind of high. Right? So that's being addressed and incorporated into this next phase of work, deciding between gate rehab and gate replacement. There were also a couple other minor things that we need to evaluate further, and we have some plans to address those in later projects.

Charlie L Shugart: I imagine going into a project like this, you fully expect there to be things you weren't expecting to come across?

Wesley Williams: Absolutely.

Lacey Darr: Every project.

Wesley Williams: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, with the infrastructure that we have, you know, being, you know, 60 years at Granbury, what, 80, 90-something at PK, I mean, you know, you just never know what you're going to find.

Charlie L Shugart: Okay. Well, talk to everybody about what makes this project so important. How does this help ensure that BRA can continue to manage our water resources successfully?

Lacey Darr: Part of our strategic plan says that it's our goal to ensure the operation and maintenance of BRA water supply and associated infrastructure in a safe, responsible manner in compliance with all applicable requirements. These Tainter gates are an important part of that infrastructure in how we manage water supply and flood operations. We take on projects like this to ensure every part of our resources are operating effectively and supporting our goals as intended.

Charlie L Shugart: 100%. Maintaining what we have is just as viable as building new stuff. Now, I don't know if we touched on this. Are we doing all of this heavy evaluation work internally?

Lacey Darr: No.

Wesley Williams: No. So, we typically hire a consulting engineering firm to come in and kind of do the evaluations and stuff. We just don't have the staff. You know, the team that works on this is probably, what would you say, 40 people?

Lacey Darr: Oh, yeah.

Wesley Williams: Between the consultants and us.

Lacey Darr: Goodness, yeah, probably.

Wesley Williams: I would say, because especially if you're doing on-site testing and stuff, you have a whole crew of people that come out and do rope access and all this stuff. And so, yeah, we just don't have the internal size to do that.

Charlie L Shugart: Absolutely. It makes way more sense to bring in people who are experts in niche stuff like rope testing and do that all the time. And I imagine you guys are managing a lot of different projects at the same time anyway. Yeah. Lacey is nodding.

Wesley Williams: Yes, for sure. Yeah, and I just wanted to note as well that, you know, this project was very proactive. We didn't notice a problem and then now we're trying to scramble and figure out how to fix it.

Charlie L. Shugart: Right.

Wesley Williams: You know, we're doing this comprehensive evaluation to get to kind of a report card of the structure. Right? And so now that we have that, we know there's some areas we need to look at closer and some areas that are completely fine. And we can prioritize those in a way that makes sense, and it's not rushed.

Charlie L Shugart: Yeah. Love that. Get the report card first and then make a deliberate plan.

Wesley Williams: Instead of trying to like, you know, we noticed this big problem, and now we have to scramble and fix it.

Charlie L Shugart: Did I hear a timeline of what it is we're looking at doing for this?

Wesley Williams: So, there's two, in Phase 2, there's a Phase 2a, and there's a Phase 2b. Okay.

Charlie L Shugart: Okay.

Wesley Williams: Right? So,

Charlie L. Shugart: I love it.

Wesley Williams: The Phase 2B is the gate stuff that we're talking about. And that assessment, this design or replace or rehab, that decision hopefully is going to happen in a year-ish timeframe. Those options will, you know, be developed and then we'll get a report and a recommendation and we'll go from there. The Phase 2A, and this is a little outside of what we've been talking about, but there's going to be monorail installed into or onto the dam, replacing our old hoist trolley.

Charlie L Shugart: Okay. Definitely going to have to explain all of that.

Wesley Williams: Yeah.

Lacey Darr: That's probably….

Charlie L. Shugart: Okay. So, what's the current hoist trolley on the dam?

Wesley Williams: So, we have a big steel, like, trolley is really the only word for it.

Lacey Darr: Like an old...

Wesley Williams: Yeah, just kind of a cart, like a giant cart, and that just actually predates the dam. It's older than the dam.

Charlie L Shugart: Wow. Wait, seriously? It's older than the dam itself.

Wesley Williams: We bought it and installed it. There are tracks that it runs on, and that's what we use to place and remove stop logs. So, stop logs are these steel blocks, basically, that stack one on top of the other, and you put them in front of the Tainter gate, and then it's blocked off. Like, it's watertight. It's, you know, it leaks a little bit, but it, you know, prevents the water from rushing through the gates. You can do maintenance on the gate.

Charlie L Shugart: That's in the lake. You're dropping the stop logs.

Wesley Williams: Right in front of the Tainter gate, it's got slots.

Charlie L Shugart: Okay.

Wesley Williams: And you drop them in the slots. There's well, I'm not going to say a number because I don't know what it is.

Charlie L. Shugart: That's ok.

Wesley Williams: There's several that you stack on top of the other

Charlie L Shugart: Yeah.

Wesley Williams: Or one on top of the other, and then it holds back the water.

Charlie L Shugart: That's actually really cool. So, then you can access the Tainter gate.

Wesley Williams: You can access the front side of the gate. You can get in between the stop log and the gate, and you can look at it and do whatever maintenance you need to do, and you can completely open the gate if you need to, and there's no water that'll come through.

Charlie L Shugart: Which obviously is super important. As a water supply reservoir, we've got to keep in as much water as we can because not only do we not know when the next drought will start, but we don't know how long or intense the next drought will be. Thank you very much, Mother Nature, for not sharing your calendar with us.

Wesley Williams: So that hoist trolley is what places those stop logs. That thing is very old.

Charlie L Shugart: Must be if it's older than the dam itself.

Wesley Williams: It's very… yeah. And the maintenance staff has done a fantastic job of repairing that thing and making it still function well past its useful life.

Charlie L Shugart: Right. That's that term. Okay. So, we're part of the evaluation of looking at what can either be done to replace or improve.

Wesley Williams: Right. So, the Phase 2a, we did a Phase 1. Right? And that looked at the gates and it also looked at, you know, all the components of the dam that we needed to look at to install or start design of this monorail system. The Phase 2a is going to go into design on the monorail system. So hopefully in a year and a half-ish, we'll have a complete design ready for bid on the monorail and some concrete repairs that needed to happen along with that.

Charlie L Shugart: What would be the difference between a monorail and the current trolley system?

Wesley Williams: Yeah. So, the trolley system travels along the bridge deck on tracks. Monorail is onto the buttresses, and that's another term I'll probably need to define.

Charlie L. Shugart: Please.

Wesley Williams: But so, the monorail is on the buttresses, which is the large concrete …

Lacey Darr: Concrete. That's concrete.

Wesley Williams: Thank you. Man, I really need a picture for this.

Lacey Darr: I know. We do.

Wesley Williams: I need a succinct way to describe buttress. I mean, it's what's in between the Tainter gates. Right? So, you have a gate and a gate, and then you have a buttress, and that helps support.

Charlie L Shugart: Wall?

Wesley Williams: Gate. Yeah, wall.

Charlie L Shugart: Okay. Yeah.

Wesley Williams: Well …

Charlie L Shugart: The divider in between the gates.

Wesley Williams: Yeah. And it's

Charlie L Shugart: A bit more technical than that, but

Wesley Williams: Structural element, right? I mean, it's, you know, it's doing more than just dividing, but yeah, that's a good way to think about it. It's just dividing each gate. And so, on top of each one of those, there's going to be a big steel structure erecting a horizontal monorail to travel the length of the dam in line with the stop log slots.

Charlie L Shugart: Interesting.

Lacey Darr: It can carry stop logs.

Wesley Williams: So, it'll carry, right.

Lacey Darr: Along, like, much safer, much quicker.

Wesley Williams: Yes.

Charlie L Shugart: Yeah. See, you didn't need a picture, you did great.

Wesley Williams: Safer and quicker were the two...

Lacey Darr: And easier.

Wesley Williams: Safer and quicker were the two things, because it takes them about a day to install the stop logs for one gate.

Lacey Darr: One gate.

Charlie L Shugart: Oh, wow. A full day to install the stop logs for one gate? Yeah. Safer and quicker is a huge win. And I imagine safety plays a massive part in this, because those stop logs are gigantic and incredibly heavy.

Wesley Williams: Yeah. Yeah. I don't have a weight off the top of my head.

Charlie L Shugart: That’s okay. So, I'm definitely going to bring you guys back in a year and a half is what you're telling me. That way you guys can give us an update on where we are in this project evaluating if we'll be replacing or rehabbing the gates and how the monorail system is coming.

Wesley Williams: Yeah. Yeah. Fingers crossed, like Lacey said at the beginning of this, got an executed or about to get an executed contract.

Lacey Darr: Yeah. Yeah. Just needs a signature.

Wesley Williams: For both of these Phases. Right? So hopefully, in about a year and a half, we will have a project ready for bid for construction on the monorail and associated concrete work.

Charlie L Shugart: Yeah.

Lacey Darr: Exciting stuff.

Charlie L. Shugart: Yeah. I can't wait to touch base in a year to, like, see where we're at. Okay. Now, you mentioned earlier that this is super proactive work and not because something went off the rails, but just to reassure everyone listening's anxiety, is there any concern about the Lake Granbury's DeCordova Bend Dam’s gates’ current stability?

Lacey Darr: No.

Wesley Williams: No. No. I mean, like I said earlier, this is very proactive. We’re doing this so that we don't have that issue. This isn't because, you know, that we noticed a big problem. This is preventative. This is course of doing business. Right? We don't have a major problem that we're trying to …

Charlie L Shugart: It's not an emergency we're scrambling for.

Wesley Williams: No. Not a no. Not for the damn safety part of it. We are, I mean, it is I don't want to say urgent, but for the monorail or the hoist trolley replacement, I mean, that has been needing to happen. That is a big-time thing for them. It’s a bit of a safety thing for them as well, and so that one is priority. But, yeah, this isn't a structural or a dam safety.

Charlie L Shugart: I think that's something that, you know, most people on a day-to-day basis, they don't really think, Oh, we're opening the gates, we're closing the gates, you know, they're thinking that's it. But there really is a lot of maintenance and other parts of the dam you have to do to keep everything running and safe and extend its useful life.

Wesley Williams: Exactly.

Lacey Darr: A lot of moving parts.

Charlie L Shugart: A lot of moving parts. Okay. Alright. Well, have we left anything out that you guys want to make sure that people understand about this project or why we're doing it?

Wesley Williams: I think we've hit the project. I just want to shout out the maintenance staff again. They do a fantastic job of keeping this aging infrastructure operational. The effort, the expertise at Lake Granbury, and really across the basin in all of the wastewater and all of the stuff that they do is just excellent. And I don't think we can overstate how good a job they do.

Lacey Darr: Absolutely.

Charlie L Shugart: 100%. That was a great call out. Our maintenance team, our lake staff, our project staff, like, everybody works tirelessly behind the scenes. And that, guys, that definitely includes you two as well. All right. Well, Lacey, Wesley, thank you both for coming in and talking about this project. It's really cool work, and I think this is a great look at a project that maybe most people wouldn't normally hear about. Hearing how much work actually goes into this kind of thing really helps you respect everything that goes into Lake Granbury's DeCordova Bend Dam.

Lacey Darr: Absolutely. Thank you.

Wesley Williams: Thanks for having us.

Charlie L Shugart: To anyone listening, if you've got questions, don't hesitate to reach out. You can email us at [e-mail]. And if you've got a topic you'd like to hear us dive into on the podcast, let us know that too. Thanks for sharing a slice of your day with us. Be good to yourself. Look out for one another. And we'll see you next time on Unpacking the Brazos River.