Sunday, February 12, 2012

Finally Real Progress

Finally there is a crack in the wall that has prevented the Corps from Cooperating with us on better control of lake levels. In the next month or two the Corps will issue an EA permitting them to change the drought control plan as drought conditions warrant. For years we have pleaded for such a change based on experience in actual drought conditions but for years the Corps has insisted they could not do that. They continually claimed they needed a phase 2 study before they could make such a change.

There should be a request for public comments when this EA is announced. Please send in your comments when they are called for. We will publish email and mailing addresses as soon as the request for comments goes out.

The main thing needed is a change in basis for release rates away from what everyone wishes for downstream to what Nature makes available in rain. In other words the Corps needs to acknowledge that neither us nor the Corps can create water and if we use more than rain provides we are destroying our lakes. Save Our Lakes Now proposal for several years has been to drop release rates to the annual rate of rainfall during the drought of record anytime the lakes drop 2ft from full pool. This rate is 3600cfs. If the drought is short lived the lakes will refill quickly and releases can be returned to normal. But if the drought is like the one of record in 2008 the lakes could fluctuate on the order of 8ft but the drop should not be catastrophic like the one in 2008. The tendency of the Corps in the past has been too timid to drop to 3600 cfs. Instead they use 4,000 or 3800 cfs. These sound like a nice compromise until you realize that each 100cfs equals one foot of level in a years time. So 4,000 cfs leads to 4ft more drop than 3600 cfs over the period of one year. In our opinion they should be looking at ways to go even below 3600 when possible such as 3100 cfs during winter months and complete stoppage of releases when the river below Thurmond dam is swollen from heavy rains.


One other concern Save Our Lakes Now has is the blind faith the Corps seems to have in studies. Either innocently or intentionally they listen to unrealistic claims of groups who have a negative bias against maintaining reasonable release rates. We recommend that the Corps allow groups such as Save Our Lakes Now who strongly support recreational concerns to be involved in interpreting studies to determine optimum release rates.