Denison Dam

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Reservoir information
Denison Dam
Official name	Denison Dam
Impounds	Red River of the South
Creates	Lake Texoma
Locale	Oklahoma/Texas
Maintained by	US Army Corps of Engineers
Height	670 ft (204 m)
Opening date	1943
Capacity	2,525,568 acre feet (3.1 km³) flood stage
Surface area	89,000 acres (360 km²)
Geographical Data
Coordinates	33°49′5″N 96°34′20″W / 33.81806, -96.57222

Denison Dam, also sometimes called Lake Texoma Dam is a dam on the Red River of the South, creating Lake Texoma, straddling the border between Texas and Oklahoma. Completed in 1943 primarily as a flood control project, it was at the time the "largest rolled-earth fill dam in the world"^[1]. Only three times has the lake reached the dam's spillway at a height of 640 ft (195.07 m), first in 1957, then in 1990, and most recently, in July 2007. It takes its name from Denison, Texas, just downriver from the damface.

Denison Dam contains a total of 18.8 million cubic yards (14,000,000 m³) of rolled-earth fill. It produces roughly 250,000 megawatt hours of electricity per year, while Lake Texoma provides nearly 125,000 acre feet (154,000,000 m³) of water storage for local communities under five permanent contracts.

In addition to two federally managed wildlife-refuge areas, Denison Dam has made possible 47 recreational areas managed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, two state parks -- one in Oklahoma and one in Texas -- as well as 80,000 acres (320 km²) of open public land used for hunting.

[...] General Lucius D. Clay was the principal manager of the project.^[2]

A tremendous level of recreational development surrounds the lakeshore.