History is in the Water: Texas Dams aren’t getting any younger

This historical marker on the “Paddlewheels of the Trinity” in the foreground of the reservoir, with the rusted fence and worn concrete seems like an apt image for this history.

Earlier this month the Washington Post reported on a study that showed “dozens” of sinking dams across the US. The author opened with a site I know well: the Livingston Dam on the Trinity River.

“A decade of observations suggested that part of the Livingston Dam – a 2.5-mile-long earth and concrete structure about 70 miles north of Houston – was sinking by roughly 8 millimeters per year.” This is cause for concern! Indeed, in the summer of 2024 the Trinity River Authority put the dam on a potential failure watch.

Of course there are many reasons for this threat, but this is partly a story of age, completed in the 1960s, the dam is getting old. The earth is settling, the concrete is getting scoured, all while the river is always changing. Dams are coming down fast throughout the country, and the biggest cause is rooted in their age, which relates to both their safety and economic utility among other factors.

Texas was relatively late to the dam-building game. In my book I included a great quote from Robert Caro’s Lyndon B Johnson biographies when as a young, dogged congressman seeking federal support for development and electricity in the Hill Country, Johnson so annoyed President Roosevelt that Roosevelt said “Oh, give the kid the dam.”

In my upcoming book, The River that Made Texas, the construction of Lake Livingston happens in one of the last chapters—its construction is recent in the scope of the river’s long history. During one of my research talks nine years ago in Livingston, I was surprised by how many people were still angry about the construction of the dam that had flooded land they loved. Even fifty years after the floodgates closed, the locals I spoke with were mourning. The pain does not just wash away.

Texas went dam crazy from the 1930s to 1990s, and now those dams are getting old at the same time that the state is heating up. You can dam the Trinity, but you cannot escape its history.