It's been under construction since 2005.

Back in the mid 1990s, the community of Mill Creek and most of southern Randolph County suffered a bad drought. It was so bad that several homes were just a day or two away from having no water at all.

That's where the idea for the dam came from. And now the crews building that structure say it's almost ready to go.

The Elkwater Fork Dam is imposing at first glance. It is hard to grasp the scale of the structure. From top to bottom it is about as tall a 12-story building.

The concrete damn was built by Heeter Construction from Spencer West Virginia. Most of the crew is from the Randolph County area and 80 percent of the materials used to build the dam come from West Virginia.

But filling the water up behind the dam will be a little more complicated than turning a faucet on. Actually it could take anywhere from a few weeks to a few years. It all depends on how much rain we get.

Jim Harman is with the Tygart Valley Conservation District. He has been working on the project since 2000 and said the project is about a year a head of schedule.

But there is still a lot of work to be done. Crews were working on the spillway Tuesday. That's where the water will run down from the dam into the stream below ensuring a constant supply of water.

David Heeter the operation manager for the project says construction should wrap up next spring.

To give you some more details about what went into building the dam, the $31 million project took 15,000 delivery trucks, bringing everything from equipment and materials.

And when it's done the dam will have a state-of-the-art satellite monitoring system in place.