YES VIRGINIA, THE CORPS CAN CONTROL LAKE LEVEL

Over the past couple of months the Corps has demonstrated how they can hold lake levels within 6".  But that was because they wanted to in order to help fish spawning.  Our problem is they don't appear to want to hold the level for recreation purposes.

We know, and the Corps has stated in repeated analyses of the impact of release rates, that as long as the release rate out of Thurmond is equal to or greater than 3600 cfs there is no significant environmental impact downstream.  Congress stipulated 30 some years ago that recreation should be protected along with all the other concerns of the Savannah River Basin.  And by recreation they were talking about the huge infrastructure that is associated with lake access and use by the public.  It doesn't take a rocket scientist to combine those two pieces of information and justify keeping the lakes full by reducing release rates to as low as 3600cfs to maintain the level.  There will be times when 3600cfs will allow the lake levels to drop more than 6" but not to the catastrophic levels experienced repeatedly over the past decade.

All the arguments against this have one major flaw.  The current drought plan asks that we release more water than nature supplies by rain.  One would think the simple desire to preserve as much fresh water as possible would defeat any such argument.  The Corps knows we should conserve water as much as possible.  They demonstrate this with their water saving hypocrisy in their offices such as waterless urinals.  Release rates of just a few hundred cfs above 3,600 dwarf the amount of water being saved with the best of water saving tactics.  No city downstream with control over watering lawns or using waterless urinals like the ones in use by the Corps can begin to make up for the waste we repeatedly see when the Corps refuses to drop release rates to a minimum during a drought.

In the humble opinion of this author, man is not smart enough to do a better job than nature does. We can take out the ravages of severe flooding and even severe drought but trying to run nature like a piece of machinery is futile. A prime example of what I am saying is to look out West at Lake Powel which has been literally destroyed by continually releasing more water than nature provides.  The situation out there is so bad they are even trucking salmon to the ocean which is another example of the futility of trying to out smart nature.