The Schömbach dam is located around 50 kilometers south of Leipzig on the border between Saxony and Thuringia. Due to its importance for flood protection in Saxony, the facility is operated by the Free State of Saxony. The dam is part of a complex flood protection system in the southern area of Leipzig - the Lower Pleiße flood retention system. The dam is of great importance for the overall management of the system. It can hold around 6.2 million cubic meters of floodwater and thus protects the communities along the Wyhra. In the event of a flood that statistically recurs every 100 years, it is thus possible to reduce the peak discharge from 90 to 10 cubic meters per second.

The Schömbach dam was built between 1967 and 1972 to protect against flooding. At that time, many bodies of water were relocated and diked as a result of open-cast mining on the Pleiße, meaning that natural flooding areas were no longer available. Originally, the dam was planned as a green flood retention basin with a volume of 7.6 million cubic meters, which would only be dammed during floods. It was intended to protect the region's open-cast lignite mine from flooding. However, the dam was later given another function with the irrigation of agricultural land. It was therefore expanded into a dam in 1977 and a permanent reservoir of one million cubic meters of water was created. The demand for water continued to rise in the following years, so that the reservoir was dammed up to two million cubic meters in 1979. Today, it normally holds around 1.5 million cubic meters.