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Surface water would easily be lost in stream flow and evaporation, especially in semi-arid and arid climates. Therefore, sand dams provide an effective and sustainable water access strategy by capturing surface water for an economic way of storage. To prevent losses from runoff, building sand dams can help solve water shortage problems during dry seasons. This work focuses on evaluating the behavior of the river system with and without sand dams under high, medium, and low stream flow conditions. The study was conducted by setting up an HEC-RAS model and using ArcGIS to support the spatial calculation of areas and watershed volumes needed for the simulation. Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) are used to provide the cross section profiles of the watershed and the storage area evaluation. The water surface elevation of the model is mainly affected by the discharge of the Tippecanoe River at Winamac, Indiana, and by the groundwater flow and the storage areas interaction. Moreover, using a HEC-RAS model, in this paper, a comprehensive analysis and discussions are provided which give a better understanding of the behavior of the complicated river systems. Calibration was also conducted to provide a more precise model environment for the study. This work found that sand dams can help control the flow peak during low and medium stream flow and are able to store water. However, under a high flow condition, sand dams are not capable of handling stormwater because of overtopping. These findings relate directly to the size and height of the dams design. Moreover, roughness coefficient, vegetation, groundwater inflow and storage area also indirectly influence the storage capability of the sand dams. Therefore, this work found that constructing sand dams can help delay the time of flow peaks, and thus, providing better water storage in wet seasons that can be useful later during dry seasons.