The most recent release of balancing the basin goes into great detail about how lake levels are managed. If this truly represents the thinking of the Savannah River Basin Corps' leadership, they fully intend to continue the same drought plan that generated so much destruction in the last decade. In my mind there is no justification for such a refusal to change. You can claim all kinds of maybe situations that could arrive from change. But these pale in light of the definite destruction that occurs with no change.
We have accomplished one major feat so far with the efforts of Save Our Lakes Now. There used to be 10 gross distortions of the truth used to justify the old drought plan. These never come up any more because one by one we showed the fallacies of these different claims. For example the dissolved oxygen in the harbor is not affected by release rates. This is shown by oxygen measurements at Clio upstream of the harbor and the fact that ocean tides overwhelm the impact of inflow from the river. Another is the fact that any argument about power generation involves straight economics and the destruction to real estate values and the infrastructure for recreation around the lakes is far greater than any money saved from power generation.
We need representation at the meetings where release rates are discussed and we need a congressman that takes no double talk concerning lake level control . All the expensive studies that are in place are fine if you want more data. But you don't need any additional data to understand that our current drought plan is badly flawed. The data from the past decade combined with good engineering judgment are more than adequate to come up with vast improvements to the drought plan.
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