WID Bulletin #203, August 2002
Floods Hit Area
Barcroft Danger Averted
30 years ago, on June 22, 1972, the Washington Post blazoned
this banner headline and sub-head. The story began: Torrential rains, whipped by heavy winds, caused major
flooding in the Washington area last night....
Paragraph two said: Civil defense workers reported that the Lake
Barcroft Dam near Bailey's Crossroads breached near its west end shortly
after 11 p. m., and a heavy volume of water poured down the Holmes Run
Valley. By 2 a. m., however, the level of water in the lake had fallen 10
feet and the danger was past officials reported.
Comparably, the Evening Star Metro Section only said: Hundreds of homes
below Lake Barcroft were evacuated just before midnight as water pressure
built up behind the lake's earthen dam, causing it to erode at the edges.
A photograph, comparable to this one, was captioned: Water spills around Lake Barcroft Dam, undermining a
house.
Old-timers recall that eventful night. Admiral Cal Laning, who was the
community lake manager, and officers of BARLAMA watched helplessly as the
stuck tipping gates atop the dam caused an overflow around the west end
ultimately eroding the earthen section of the dam so deeply that there was
only a relatively small puddle of water left where the lake had been.
Subsequently, the Lake Barcroft community spent
several million dollars repairing the dam and restoring the lake by
creating the Lake Barcroft Watershed Improvement District.
Fairfax County officials testified in court against the restoration of the lake but the presiding
judge ruled otherwise. Whitman Requardt and Associates, WID's consulting
engineers, designed and supervised the construction of a bascule
gate emergency spillway and restored the dam. By August, 1974, the
lake was full again.
Jack Perkins, who owned the pictured house, moved to
Los Angeles and can be heard regularly on cable television.
Photo by Ted Jones