Tuttle Creek Lake is a reservoir on the Big Blue River 5 miles (8 km) north of Manhattan, in the Flint Hills region of northeast Kansas.

[4] The base of the dam is bordered by Tuttle Creek State Park, which features 1,200 acres (4.9 km2) of recreational areas, including nature trails, camping sites, and an artificial beach.

The construction of Tuttle Creek Dam as a Corps of Engineers project was given particular impetus by the Great Flood of 1951, which inundated downtown Manhattan, Topeka, and the West Bottoms of Kansas City.

Residents of the Blue Valley organized opposition under the phrase "Let's quit this dam foolishness," and the campaign led to victory for Democrat Howard Shultz Miller in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1952.

[10] When the dam was completed and the lake began filling up in 1962, it affected ten towns and entirely submerged four of them (from north to south): Cleburne at 39°31′49″N 96°38′6″W / 39.53028°N 96.63500°W / 39.53028; -96.63500, Randolph, Garrison Cross and Stockdale.

As expected, the released water had rapidly scoured away all soil on the floor of the unlined chute and then quickly removed a few feet of loose, weathered rock, exposing solid, durable limestone shelves.

This area is of interest to geologists due to its superb exposure of the 300 million year old rocks of the upper-Carboniferous and lower-Permian underlying the Flint Hills.

[16] These strata attest to a flat, arid paleoenvironment along the western margin of Pangaea with intermittent marine transgressions from the Panthalassa Ocean.

As sea levels rose and fell over the course of many millennia, so too did the depositional environment change, resulting in repeating sequences of rock strata distinctive to the late paleozoic.

[15] However, the previously unexposed Roca Shale, which had demonstrated remarkable durability during the release, was expected to undergo rapid severe deterioration if left open to the effects of the Kansas climate.

Weaker and fractured limestone shelves were grouted and then buttressed with shotcrete, and then the area was covered with terraced soil and returned to grass.

To address this threat, the Army Corps of Engineers completed a project in July 2010 that reinforced the dam with more than 350 concrete walls to stop channels in the underlying karst, and equipped it with warning sensors.