Longhorn Dam
| Longhorn Dam | |
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The upstream side of Longhorn Dam in 2005
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 Location of Longhorn Dam in USA Texas
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| Official name | Longhorn Dam |
| Location | Austin, Texas, United States |
| Coordinates | 30°15′1″N 97°42′49″W / 30.25028°N 97.71361°WCoordinates: 30°15′1″N 97°42′49″W / 30.25028°N 97.71361°W |
| Opening date | 1960 |
| Operator(s) | City of Austin |
| Dam and spillways | |
| Impounds | Colorado River |
| Height | 36 feet (11 m) |
| Length | 506 feet (154 m) |
| Reservoir | |
| Creates | Lady Bird Lake |
| Surface area | 471 acres (191 ha) |
Longhorn Dam is a dam crossing the Colorado River in Austin, Texas, United States, where it creates Lady Bird Lake. Completed in 1960, the dam was built by the City of Austin as the last in a chain of Colorado River dams in central Texas begun during the Great Depression. The name refers to its location on a ford used for longhorn cattle drives as a part of the Chisholm Trail in the late 19th century.
Longhorn Dam was constructed in the late 1950s to establish a cooling reservoir for Austin's Holly Street Power Plant, a 570-megawatt natural gas and fuel oil-fired electrical power plant. The reservoir it created, Lady Bird Lake, was also originally used as a source of drinking water for the city. In 2007 the power plant was decommissioned and subsequently demolished to make way for a new lakeside urban park; today the reservoir's major uses are recreation and fishing. The stabilization of the downtown shoreline that the dam afforded enabled substantial parkland development along the newly created lake, including Auditorium Shores and other parts of Town Lake Park.
In the 2000s and 2010s the ageing dam's floodgates experienced a series of malfunctions, causing on some occasions the loss of substantial amounts of water down the river (when gates failed to close properly) and on some occasions significant flooding along Lady Bird Lake (when gates failed to open). The dam is operated by Austin Energy, the city power utility, but it is not a hydroelectric dam and generates no electrical power; since the Holly Power Plant's closure the dam has received little maintenance. City officials have estimated the cost of repairing or replacing the dam in the tens of millions of dollars.
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Wikipedia