Save Our Lakes Now represents the interests of lake stakeholders of the Savannah River Basin. In that capacity we would like to complement the new Colonel for not dropping the lakes 4' as they normally do in the winter months. In the past the corps has prided themselves in honoring all pleas for protecting the various stakeholders of the Savannah River Basin. But this was with one notable exception. All pleas, even screams for mercy from lake stakeholders, never brought about any modification to Corps plans.
This year we pleaded that the Corps reevaluate their need to drop the lakes 4' for cold weather months when runoff from rains can cause large increases in lake level relative to warm weather months. We pointed out that a 2' drop now was the same as a 4' drop before Lake Hartwell. But we were met with a lackluster response of "we may look into that but don't expect any changes to the rule curve".
Without any fanfare the lakes were held at 2' below full pool. We can only hope this means we finally have an advocate in Savannah.
This year, with one further change, we can begin to come out of a horrible reputation in the recreation community. That change would be to hold lake levels at full pool as long as release rates are greater than or equal to 3600cfs. This change would stay within release rates demonstrated to be tolerable downstream and, according to many experts in the field of environmental protection and fish and wildlife, the variation in flows would more closely approximate nature without her damaging extremes.
One of the Corps assignments from congress is to protect the recreational infrastructure. That has been largely ignored up to now. In a couple of years the change in winter lake levels and holding the lakes as close to full pool as possible should let the recreational infrastructure blossom into a thing of beauty. Real estate values of homes built on the lake, businesses associated with recreation and the overall attraction of this area from the standpoint of recreation will improve exponentially as confidence in our lakes from the standpoint of recreation returns. All one has to do is look at what happens in other water recreation areas such as The Grand Stand along the coast of South Carolina or the Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri to see what can happen.
