CONROE, Texas -- It's Mother's Day weekend and Terressa Ramos was watering 7,000 flowerpots at her family's fruit stand near the base of the Lake Conroe Dam,

There are as many flowers here as there are dams in Texas. So Ramos was surprised to learn that the state has about the same number of people inspecting its 7,000 dams, as she does watering her flowers: just seven.

It turns out; a lot of dams are not being inspected. The state tries to inspect 70 percent of dams every five years. Instead, the Texas State Auditor has found - inspectors actually visited just 43 percent.

And when inspectors found a problem, half the time they never followed up.

"There's a lot of dams that we don't know the condition they're in,” said Reed Eichelberger, of the San Jacinto River Authority.

He hires engineers to check the dams for the river authority. But he worries about the smaller dams because the state doesn't have the staff to check them.

"They are tremendously understaffed for the number of dams in Texas no doubt,” said Eichelberger.

By comparison, California has one state inspector for every 22 dams. In Texas, there's one for every 1,029.

On Friday, a spokesman for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality said that all those things in that report are true, and they could all be solved if the legislature would give the department more money for more inspectors.

"Now that I'm thinking about it, there's not enough people to go around,” said Ramos, who sits in the path of a potential disaster should the nearby dam fail. “It's going to happen. Something's bound to happen."

But there is good news here. The state's dam inspection department is drafting a plan to hire more workers.

They just need to find the money before it rushes away.