REVISITING THE PROPOSAL FOR 2' WINTER DRAW DOWNS INSTEAD OF 4'

As I'm sure most of you are aware the corps continues to do a sterling job of maintaining lake levels. 
We certainly commend them on this and hope they will not hesitate to go to minimum release rates to hold level as much as possible if we get into another drought.  On a different note, there was an interesting post on Balancing the Basin by Billy Birdwell that could serve as a great argument to go to a 2' drawdown rather than a 4' drawdown in the winters. Quoting from Billy's post

"Our water managers don’t rely solely on computer models or theories, but on decades of working in this basin under a wide range of conditions. They’ve seen floods, droughts, heat waves, ice storms, tropical storms, and years of other weather.

Our water managers are scientist-engineers and draw on the latest scientific methods as well as years of real-world observations to accomplish all their missions in the most efficient way possible. Although they don’t have ‘crystal balls’ to consult, they actually have something better – science tempered with experience and insight."
~Billy Birdwell, Corporate Communications Office

So far as years of real-world observations, from the time Thurmond was built until Hartwell came on the scene a 4' drawdown was used in the winter. The total area rain runoff comes from remains unchanged.  It is the whole basin from the mountains to the Thurmond Dam.  The difference now is that we have both Hartwell and Russell collecting that runoff in addition to Thurmond.  Using that science tempered with experience Billy talks about, a 2' drawdown now should be equivalent to the 4' drawdown used before Hartwell was built.  In other words the amount of runoff remains unchanged but the amount of space to collect that runoff is now twice what it used to be.