Kentucky Dam, located 22 miles upstream from where the Tennessee River joins the Ohio River at Paducah, Kentucky, is particularly important to protecting land in the lower Ohio and Mississippi River valleys. It provides more storage capacity than any other TVA reservoir — a total of four million acre-feet. (That’s a volume equal to one foot of water covering four million acres of land.) This helps to protect the Mississippi River levee system, guarding six million acres of land in Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana, and helps reduce the frequency of flooding on four million acres of land not protected by the levee system.

When flood flows occur in the upper Mississippi River basin, water is released from Kentucky Reservoir before the Ohio River crests at Paducah and the Mississippi River crests at Cairo, Illinois (just one or two days’ water travel time from Kentucky Dam). The objective is to discharge the Tennessee River flood crest in advance of the Ohio and Mississippi flood crests so that there is sufficient storage volume in Kentucky to hold back water during the Cairo flood peak. After the Cairo flood crest has passed down the Mississippi, floodwaters stored in Kentucky are released as downstream conditions permit.