The spill gates opened at Roosevelt Dam Wednesday, releasing millions of gallons of water down the Salt River.
It's part of the Salt River Project's annual testing of its two spillways and four spill gates, making sure they're ready in case of flooding.
This year's test is a unique one, however, since they're releasing more water due to the wet winter.
The test drew in dozens of onlookers, including Dennis Shelley of Snowflake.
"It's a neat show seeing all that water flowing out of there," he said.
Normally the test is conducted in August, but it was moved to May this year since water levels at Roosevelt Lake are in "Flood Control Space," meaning more water needs to be released.
The lake reached its highest level ever earlier this year and was also at its highest level for a spillway test.
Ivan Insua, the director of Hydro Generation for SRP, says they're releasing water at 12,000 cubic feet per second, which is enough to provide showers to around one million Valley residents every minute.
Even with that much water being released, Insua says it'll barely move the current lake level.
"We're probably releasing closer to 2,000 acre-feet of water. That's about 650 million gallons," he said. "What's also pretty amazing with all that water is that we're just going to lower the lake less than half an inch."
Since March, more than 700,000 acre-feet of water, or 228 billion gallons, have been released into the Salt River to ensure reservoirs can handle all of the water flow from this past winter's snowmelt.
The water spilling out of the gates on Wednesday will flow downstream to Apache Lake and be stored for future water use.
