Yes you could it was crazy.

You must not know how big of a lake we are talking about evidently.

Maybe and lets hope the "The lake is only around 1.38 high" guy meant to say "why are they blasting it down stream when the lake is only 1.38 feet high".

its not a flood control lake it wasn't designed to be, if they didn't dump that water it probably would of ended up like that city except it would be a area that is almost 80 miles long, and the lake probably would of went 8-12 ft high, I would have made the same call except that I would have started letting out a lot of water 4-5 days earlier because you could see it coming by the weather which might of helped some but that town probably still would have probably flooded

Yes it could have been handled better, I have had property on the river below the dam for years. The river below the dam has been getting shallow and shallow and narrow for years. The river needs to be cleaned out but everyone likes the sand bars that choke it off. But 20" of rain over such a wide area doesn't help. Just look at Bossier, West Monroe. And it suppose to rain this weekend again. Maybe it want be as much. When the dam was build the lake didn't suppose to be that big but that is what we have now between Texas and Louisiana and it is the Number 1 bass lake in the country right now.

I expect the lake will be kept at a little lower level in the future. Seems like they did this years ago - keeping it between 168-170 to be able to hold some water during the winter/spring.

The water in that video is getting dangerously close to the top of the dam. What do you think happens when water goes over a dam? Disaster. They have to let it out. Period.

No one is arguing the danger of the level on the lake. It's the lack of foresight by SRA to release water earlier so they didn't have to release a record amount of 207,000 CFS for 36 hours. That's the issue. There have been floods for hundreds of years along that river. The record before this week was set in the 1880's before a lake existed. SRA knows they can't hold water like Rayburn. They easily could have started releasing early. People make mistakes all the time and I'm willing to bet they would handle it different if they had to do it all over again.

I've thought about this and I can see both sides of the story.

What do they do in the future when the forecast is calling for a bunch of rain in a week? Do they start dumping 5 feet of water over the coming week to prepare for all the upcoming rain? How many times will the forecast have to miss before that practice is stopped?

I'm not sure anyone was expecting that much water. By the time they could see it was too much, they didn't have a lot of choices to make.

In hindsight, they should have let water out earlier, but it's always easy to look back at a situation and figure out what should have been done. I seriously doubt they expected that much water over 3 days.

With that much release Ivie would be full in less than 1 day & I wish it was possible to put that water in Ivie. What a great little lake it is. Haven't been on it in years but I was impressed with it back then. Praying for big rains for Ivie this spring. Praying for downstream residents on the Sabine.

Lakes listed for the Sabine River basin include Fork, Martin, Murval, Tawakoni & Toledo Bend. Sabine only feeds into Tawakoni & Toledo. And Tawakoni is really at the Sabine's headwater & has a fixed overflow. Toledo is not a flood control lake.

So there is no flood control really on the Sabine. Back around the 1970's talk was to build a lake by daming the Sabine by Gladewater. But it didn't happen.

No it wouldnt have got that high and no that town wouldnt have flooded had they started early. I was at the lake the weekend before the rain hit and they had no gates open at all and was only had one generator going.