The San Antonio Flood of 1998
Tunnel Inlet
The downtown region was lucky in that engineers had completed a drainage
tunnel under the heart of the city the previous December. This is the dam that
diverts the river into the tunnel, which can handle 7,000 gallons per minute.
The flood waters were almost even too great for this new flood control
project. This is the area upstream. U.S. Highway 281 runs across the bridge
that is just a few inches above the water.
To keep the debris from being sucked in, the structure has grates with this
massive mechanism to comb trash out periodically.
This is the flow of the river that did not get channeled off. The scale
indicates that 648 cubic feet of water is passing through every minute.
Last updated November 26, 1998