Current Level Controls Border on Insane

The corps states that they are balancing all interests with their level control rules for Lake Thurmond. But lake interests are destroyed once the lake is 5 ft below normal fill hence they are not taking care of lake interests. They are only taking care of downstream interests. Lake Murray and similar lakes are controlled with out concern for downstream interests and these lakes are full even though they have suffered the same drought that has destroyed Lake Thurmond.

If you apply basic logic to this picture you get vastly different answers than the ones the Corps is coming up with:

1) Logically hydropower generation when in a major drought makes no sense because once the lake is destroyed you won't have any further capability to generate hydropower

2) Logically if you are going to protect lake interests you will stop dropping the lake level once it reaches some reasonable level such as 5ft below normal fill.

3) Logically all the water that needs to go through the dam once the lake reaches this lower limit is the water that comes in from natural rain fall. In other words the interests downstream are no worse off than before the dam was built.

4) Logically conservationists can not argue that the water from natural rainfall is insufficient. This would be contradictory to their very existence which is basically to eliminate man's impact on nature. If the Corps releases all the water that comes in from natural rainfall the conservationists then have the same thing they would have if the dam were never built with the benefit of eliminating destructive floods.

The reason we are not following logical rules is the Corps is being led by fully political considerations. This is partly true because the Corps is not doing their job and letting the politicians know how the lakes should be controlled from an engineering rather than political concerns. It is further true because the Corps and the politicians guiding the Corps hear only from the downstream interests. Those of us who have lake interests have got to speak up on this and draw help from politicians who depend on us for their existence. We could also pick up help from national attention from people like Bill O'Reilly but we have to pull together before we can get this kind of help.