Salt River Project opens spillway gates for Roosevelt Dam release
Salt River Project cranked open the floodgates at Theodore Roosevelt Dam on Wednesday, testing the structure’s ability to protect metro Phoenix from disaster should rain and snowmelt overfill the reservoir behind it. It’s an annual routine inspection, but one that this year carried extra weight ― and extra water. The spring’s unusually strong snowmelt filled Roosevelt Lake’s storage capacity and inched into 77 vertical feet of safety buffer. SRP, a water and power provider to much of the region, timed this year’s spillway test to the end of a federally mandated 20-day period in which it had to drain several feet of water out of the 357-foot dam’s safety buffer. Most of the water passed before the test and ran through power-producing turbines.
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