It's Not Even a Lake

Friends & Neighbors,

Next time you’re walking across the Congress Avenue Bridge waiting for the bats, or paddling out onto Lady Bird Lake on a Saturday morning, consider this: it’s not really a lake. Nothing in that whole chain from Lake Travis down to downtown is. They’re reservoirs, backed up behind dams, wearing a much friendlier name. That naming choice is not an accident, and it starts with a brief history of the times Austin nearly washed away.

The flood that broke the bridge

On June 14 and 15, 1935, Travis County took on roughly 22 inches of rain in about three hours. The Colorado River crested somewhere between 41 and 50 feet, depending on which account you read, submerged the Congress Avenue Bridge, and left much of downtown underwater. Thirteen people died. Somewhere between 2,500 and 3,000 Austin residents lost their homes, and the flood tore apart part of the Lake Austin Dam’s superstructure on its way through.

(You can see it for yourself. Travis County Archives recently surfaced flood-aftermath photos buried in old District Attorney case files, including a property dispute over a South Congress building the flood destroyed. The Portal to Texas History has a free public photo of the same flood if you want to see the Colorado at 50 feet with your own eyes.)

And here’s the part that surprised me doing this research: 1935 wasn’t even Austin’s first disaster with this exact river. It wasn’t even the second.

Back in 1893, Austin built its first dam across the Colorado, a 60-foot-tall, 1,200-foot-long wall of the same pink granite used on the Capitol, built specifically to power an industrial boom that never came. Excavation started on November 5, 1890. The first stone went in on May 5, 1891. It formed a reservoir called Lake McDonald, and for a few years, Austin genuinely believed it was about to become “the Lowell of the South.”

(Before it turned deadly, Lake McDonald was just Austin’s summer playground. The Statesman ran stories about San Antonio men taking the train up for fishing weekends, and a whole controversy in 1899 over commercial trotline fishermen hogging every camping spot on the shore. There was even a park built on the banks in 1892, on land the city bought from Col. George W. Brackenridge. People had no idea what that dam was about to do.)

Then, on the morning of April 7, 1900, after more than 17 inches of rain fell in 48 hours, crowds gathered along the riverbank to watch the swollen Colorado pour eleven feet over the top of the dam. At 11:20 a.m., a chunk of it simply slid off its foundation. Lake McDonald drained in minutes. Dozens of people died, the powerhouse was destroyed, and Austin went without electricity for months and without water service for weeks.

Chunks of that original granite dam sit today at Red Bud Isle, the off-leash dog park just downstream from Tom Miller Dam. There’s a small plaque, easy to miss between the tennis-ball throwing and the trailhead signs, per KUT’s excellent 100th-anniversary piece on the disaster.

Austin was rebuilt on the same site starting in 1912. That version failed too, and it failed twice in one year. In the flood of April 20, 1915, four of the dam’s large crest gates blew out and had to be replaced immediately. Then, that September, another flood hit, more crest gates failed, and this time the project basically gave up. The turbines were pulled out and shipped off for warranty claims. Combined with the 1900 disaster, this river had now broken two dams and killed roughly 60 more people in 1915 alone. Austin spent the better part of four decades being one of the more flood-prone cities in America before anyone did anything permanent about it.

Why the Highland Lakes exist

Here’s the thing most people don’t know: the agency that fixed this, the Lower Colorado River Authority, was actually created in November 1934, seven months before the 1935 flood hit. Texas Governor Miriam “Ma” Ferguson signed the legislation after years of political fighting between Austin and downstream interests who wanted it and private utilities and West Texas interests who didn’t. The bill passed on the last day of a special legislative session, and it took a deal over where to host the upcoming Texas Centennial to get it done.

So when the flood hit in June 1935, LCRA already existed on paper. It just hadn’t built anything yet. That flood is what turned the agency from a legislative compromise into an urgent public works project. LCRA finished Buchanan Dam in 1937, named for the late Congressman James P. Buchanan, who helped push the authority’s creation through before he died. Getting Austin’s own dam rebuilt a third and final time took an agreement between LCRA and the city, engineered largely by LCRA’s general counsel Alvin Wirtz, a Central Texas power broker who a few years later would help launch the political career of a young congressman named Lyndon Johnson. That third Austin dam is the one still standing today, renamed the Tom Miller Dam after the mayor who fought for it. By 1941, LCRA had added Inks Dam, Marble Falls Dam, and the massive Mansfield Dam, completing the full chain that make up what we now call the Highland Lakes and creating Lake Travis in the process.

Here’s the detail I think people skip past: none of these are actually lakes. Every one of them is a reservoir, a stretch of river that got backed up behind a dam. “Lake” is the name Austin gave its flood control infrastructure so that nobody had to look at a spreadsheet of dam specs to enjoy a Saturday on the water. Lady Bird Lake is the clearest example, and its name has a stranger history than most people know.

The first attempt to name a lake after Lady Bird Johnson wasn’t even this lake. In 1966, Austin’s mayor proposed naming a different reservoir, out east of town, “Lake Lady Bird.” It got shot down. A longtime opponent told Council the lake’s existing name was “historic,” something like a hundred years old, and that changing it just because people had started calling it something else wasn’t a good enough reason. The renaming died there.

Lady Bird’s actual involvement with the reservoir downtown started in 1972, when she personally spoke to a new Citizens Committee about beautifying what was then called Town Lake, donating $9,000 of her own money for trees and shrubs and pledging $10,000 more. A New York philanthropist named Mary Lasker matched it with another $10,000. Readers noticed the connection almost immediately. By 1974, at least one person was already writing to the Statesman suggesting the lake should someday be renamed in her honor. It took until July 26, 2007, weeks after she died, for the city to actually do it.

Lady Bird Lake sits behind the Longhorn Dam, completed in 1960, and it exists because Austin needed somewhere for the Colorado River to go after Longhorn Dam regulates the flow coming down from the rest of the chain. It is, structurally, a very scenic holding pond.

I’ll admit my bias here: I’m still one of the old Austinites who call it Town Lake and always will. Old habits and an old name for an old reservoir apparently die harder than the flood risk did.

Same story, six times over: infrastructure first, scenery second.

Why this doesn’t mean Austin is flood-proof now

Here’s where I have to complicate this story a little. The clean version, dams got built, problem solved, isn’t the whole truth.

The Highland Lakes system controls the Colorado River mainstem. It does not control the creeks that feed into it, and Austin has plenty of those. The clearest, most painful proof of that came on Halloween morning in 2013, when Onion Creek, a tributary well outside the dam system, flooded catastrophically. Some parts of the city got close to 10 inches of rain in 24 hours. Five people died. More than 500 homes were damaged. The city ultimately approved a buyout program covering 128 homes still at risk, on top of hundreds already bought out in prior years.

(If you want the fuller story, KUT’s Halloween Floods archive and the FEMA case study on the Onion Creek buyouts both cover it well.)

The dams did their job on the river they were built for. Onion Creek was never their job. That’s not a design failure so much as a reminder that “Austin solved flooding” was never really true. Austin solved one specific, historically catastrophic version of flooding, and the city has been managing a different, ongoing version of the same problem ever since, mostly through buyouts, drainage fee funding, and floodplain management rather than dams.

There’s also proof that the system worked exactly as designed, at least once, in dramatic fashion. In April 1957, heavy rains sent a massive flood surge down the Colorado, the kind that historically drowned Austin. LCRA’s dam system caught it. Property damage came to about $170,000. A contemporary estimate found that without the dams, damage would have hit roughly $37 million. One Austin American writer put it simply afterward: it was the story of the worst disaster that didn’t happen, because the system didn’t let it.

That’s the good news. Here’s the caveat: Longhorn Dam’s floodgates experienced a series of malfunctions in the 2000s and 2010s, on some occasions losing substantial amounts of water down the river when gates failed to close properly. The same dam that quietly holds back Lady Bird Lake every day is not something to take for granted just because it’s been reliable for decades. A working system in 1957 is not a guarantee of a working system forever. It’s a reason to keep checking.

Why I find this satisfying to know

I’ll tell you where my interest actually comes from. Long before my time on Council, I worked in emergency management at Williamson County, and I’ve been slowly working toward a degree in emergency management ever since, one class at a time. It’s been a slog as a working adult. After I got elected, I applied for and was selected into FEMA’s National Emergency Management Advanced Academy, a competitive program that puts you through four sequential four-day resident courses, 133 hours total, in a single federal fiscal year, plus a capstone research paper before you graduate. I successfully finished the academy while I was in office. As far as I know, I was the only elected official from Texas in my cohort, and the program told me I was the only elected official in the state who had ever gone through it. They’re very selective about who gets in, and it is a very competitive program.

My capstone paper was called “Building Bridges in Crisis: Enhancing Communication Between Emergency Managers and Local Elected Officials,” and I picked that topic because I’d just been elected and could see during my term firsthand how much of a gap there was between the two worlds. Emergency managers and elected officials need each other most in exactly the moments when there’s the least time to figure out how to talk to each other. Every paper from that program gets kept in the library at the National Emergency Training Center in Emmitsburg, Maryland, specifically so other emergency managers can learn from it. And, somewhere in Maryland right now, there is a filing cabinet with my academic paper in it for others to read and learn from.

All that to say, disasters and emergencies are not a casual curiosity for me. I find them fascinating, and that background shaped how I approached a lot of my work while I was on Council.

The principle that program drills into you is simple: you study what happened so you can prevent it from happening again, or at least prevent it from costing as much in lives and property next time. That’s not a slogan. It’s the actual discipline. The reason Austin studies the 1935 flood, the 2013 Halloween flood, and the near-miss at Longhorn Dam, all of it, is that every one of those events left behind data, and that data becomes the basis for the next buyout program, the next floodplain map, and the next piece of infrastructure that keeps someone’s house dry or someone’s life intact.

I like this story because it’s a good corrective to how we usually talk about Austin’s lakes and parks, as if they were always meant to be pretty. They weren’t. They’re the surviving evidence of a genuine civic crisis, solved imperfectly, decades ago, by people responding to real death and real destruction, and studied carefully enough since then that we know exactly where the next gap is. The paddleboard rental stand at the mouth of Barton Creek exists because a much less charming version of that same water once tore through downtown Austin and killed people. Knowing that history is not trivia. It’s how you keep it from happening again.

If you’ve got family stories about the 1935 flood, or later ones like the Halloween flood, I’d love to hear them. Hit reply.

P.S.: A good chunk of this piece came straight out of the Austin American-Statesman’s own historical archive, 1871-1980, free through your Austin Public Library card via ProQuest. If you want to see the primary documents yourself, including the 1966 “Lake Lady Bird” fight, the 1972 beautification committee story, and the 1957 flood test, here’s the folder.