Posted on August 14, 2018
Residents of the Timber Lake neighborhood are continuing cleanup efforts after last week’s flooding scattered floats, toys, dock furniture and kayaks across the 57-acre lake.
Kathy Carson’s home in the 900 block of Timberlake Road became a collection site for the area after Carson and her children spent Friday pulling neighbors’ possessions from the lake. Many of those possessions remained on Carson’s dock Monday.
“We are still sorting everything out,” Carson said. “We are returning things that we know belong to certain people but there is still so much stuff.”
Carson said residents have turned an old pontoon boat into “a floating barge” they are taking around the lake fishing out more belongings.
“We’ve been hauling out a lot of stuff and taking it over to an area by the dam,” Carson said. “It’s a mess but we will get things back to normal.”
DD Gillett, president of the Timberlake Homeowners Association, said residents hope to have things cleaned up before Labor Day.
“Labor Day is huge here at the lake and a lot of people will be coming from out of town to be with family living at the lake,” Gillett said. “We all work together to make sure we keep things in order.”
Gillett said pitching in is part of being in the close-knit community.
“We are a private-owned lake,” Gillett said. “We don’t get funding from the federal or state governments so all of the financial and physical responsibilities are ours.”
“Without people willing to do their part, there wouldn’t be a Timber Lake,” she said. “Especially after what happened in 1995.”
In 1995, the lake’s original earthen dam — which was built in the mid-1920s — failed and sent approximately 225 million gallons of water downstream onto U.S. 460 and Turkey Foot Road.
“If you can imagine that much water rushing out that quickly,” Gillett said. “It was devastating and took the lives of two people.”
Gillett said the rebuilt dam is a “controlled dam,” which is regulated by Virginia’s Department of Conservation and Recreation. DCR’s dam safety staff works to ensure dams are properly and safely designed, built, operated and maintained. Gillett said the residents of her community help officials monitor Timber Lake’s water levels and check to ensure the dam’s spillways are working properly.
Although water went over the dam’s emergency spillways last week flooding and washing out several roads downstream,including parts of Turkey Foot Road and U.S. 460, Gillett said things could have been “a lot worse.”
The dam and the spillways did exactly what they were designed to do and did them beautifully,” Gillett said. “Things went about as well as they could have considering the amount of rain we got.”
Campbell County spokesperson Sherry Harding said the county received more than 7 inches of rain during the strongest part of Thursday’s storms.
Gillett said engineers from the firm Hurt & Proffitt inspected the dam and gave a report to the Timberlake Homeowners Association’s board of directors Monday.
“We have some recovery to do at the spillway,” Gillett said. There was some erosion control at the spillway that was washed downstream a bit that we will have to bring back up but nothing too major. We just want to keep on top of things so little issues don’t become big issues down the road.”
Gillett said the board also discussed a timetable for lowering the water level of the lake so residents can repair or replace docks that were damaged during the flooding.
“We will do that sometime after Labor Day,” Gillett said. “We will keep the level down until sometime in November which will give everyone a chance to do what they need to do and then we will return the lake to normal levels in time for Christmas.”
Troy Williams — Hurt & Proffitt’s senior vice president of survey and a board member of the Timberlake Homeowners Association — said lowering the lake’s level will not cause any flooding downstream.
“We can control the outflow of water when that is done so it doesn’t create any flooding,” Williams said. “It’s a pretty routine thing and is usually done about every five years so residents can do maintenance and repairs.”
Gillett said lowering the lake’s level also will give residents a chance to look at silt deposits in the lake in preparation for a dredging project scheduled for 2019. Dredging is the operation of removing material from a water environment to create a greater depth of water.
“This will be the largest inland dredging effort in the history of the state from what I understand,” Gillett said. “And we aren’t even dredging the whole lake, just the five coves where water comes into the lake.”
Although the dredging project was planned prior to last week’s flooding, Gillett said the situation at College Lakewhich forced the evacuation of more than 100 Lynchburg residentsshows the necessity of dredging Timber Lake.
“There was 5 feet of mud and silt at College Lake from what I heard,” Gillett said. “That only left about 2 feet for water.
“We don’t want to be College Lake,” Gillett said. “We probably had a lot more silt deposited after last week so we want to get this done so we don’t have that situation here. We owe that to the residents here as well as our neighbors downstream.”
Gillett said the dredging is projected to cost about $500,000, all of which will be paid for by the lake’s residents.
“And that doesn’t include additional costs like all of the water testing that will have to be done before and after,” she said. “We have to pay for that ourselves.”
Gillett said the area is in the process of forming a Domestic Water Improvement District (DWID), which will allow the lake’s residents to tax themselves at a higher rate to fund projects like the lake’s dredging.
“There is a lot more to living at the lake than just fishing and swimming in it,” Gillett said. “We take ownership of this lake very seriously.”
However, Gillett said the effort will be “more than worth it.”
“We are excited about the dredging efforts and getting this project into place,” Gillett said. “We want this lake to be here for a long time and this will help keep this lake maintained.
Source: The News & Advance
