Wildwood Shores Needs Your Experience and Advice
Part of the mission of the Lake Conroe Association (LCA) is assisting residents and their respective associations with obtaining advice on problems that have been managed in the past by other groups. It may be an issue common to most residents – like seasonal lake lowering – or more specific like the one described below. The LCA is happy to assist with our contact list and hope that Wildwood Shores will benefit from others experience with similar problems. Please contact their representatives directly with your ideas and suggestions.
The purpose of this message is to request your help in identifying (names, phone numbers, email addresses) of individuals within other Lake Conroe communities who have had experience with dredging in their channels.
Wildwood Shores was created where East Sandy Creek enters the San Jacinto River (in southern Walker County), with about 800 lots, approaching a quarter of them with homes now. The developer created channels as he built out sections over a couple of decades between the late 1990’s and mid 2000’s. We are the most northern and probably the shallowest community on Lake Conroe. Many stumps and sandbars are hazards, especially when the lake is low, but also in places even when it is high. Sand and silt heavily enter our channels full time, but especially in floods, most of all from Hurricane Harvey.
In the record drought year of 2011, we had water in central areas but were dry around docks, boat slips, and even had land between our water and that of the main Lake Conroe.
We learned from the “stop lake lowering” communications that even at the southern end of the lake, where the center of the lake was much deeper, that other communities often had dry land around their docks, too. Presumably, their channels are shallow, like our area.
We have heard for some time that in some communities, groups of neighbors on a channel simply pooled money to pay for dredging of their channel. That may not be economically possible here as we are faced with a great need for dredging but have extremely limited funds.
We have also learned from very limited attempts to dredge and opinions of dredging companies that the surface below the water here is very silty, and that dredging out a trench would IMMEDIATELY result in soft, silty material very quickly sliding back in, negating the dredging effort (unless done over a very large area).
We have a good number of homes which cannot get boats out due to “islands” formed. If you can get out it is very challenging boating through the immediate area to reach the deeper water of Lake Conroe.
We have formed a dredging study and (hopefully) action committee. They are beginning to discuss potential strategies and rough estimates of costs with dredging companies – and plan to try to talk with governmental entities, professional engineers in this specialty, and other communities with experience in dredging.
Our dredging committee is led by a fellow POA Board member (and Treasurer), Richard Ediger, [email protected] 936-435-1578, and cell 713-410-3246.
I volunteered to contact the LCA, seeking as many names and contacts as possible among the various Lake Conroe communities with potential experience in this challenge.
We would appreciate VERY MUCH contact information to help our committee to rapidly and effectively gather all possible knowledge and experience that others have gained on Lake Conroe.
Looking forward to hearing from you,
Thank you!
Dale Elliott
President – Wildwood Shores POA
936-291-1423
Attached are two maps that give a perspective on the Wildwood Shores Location
