QUICK ANALYSIS OF CORPS CHANGES TO DROUGHT PLAN

The Corps has just announced with great excitement changes they plan to make to the drought plan.  Matter of fact they are having a big meeting to discuss this with the public tomorrow night in Toccoa, GA.  The excitement comes from the fact that they are raising the levels where release rates are decreased during droughts.  While this is a move in the right direction their reasoning is based on flawed assumptions and basically amounts to nothing more than smoke and mirrors.

They claim to be balancing the economic impact on hydropower against that of recreation. There are two major problems with their reasoning. First their is no economic impact on hydropower from droughts.  According to the South Eastern Power Association (SEPA) it doesn't matter to them where they are obtaining power from within the 8 reservoir systems they draw hydropower from.  When we are in drought most of the others are not and our loss in production can easily be made up from the others. Second the economic impact on recreation is based on badly flawed data. The Corps tried to measure the economic impact of low lake levels but did so during a time of repeated low lake levels that have destroyed our reputation on level control.  That is like trying to measure the impact on the dollar value of a car from a bad ding when the car is already full of dings. You can only get a true measure when you look at a time when the car is in like new condition.
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Simply looking at the waste of fresh water when you send more water to the river (and hence the ocean) than is available from rain says we need to reduce releases to the minimum possible anytime the lakes cannot be held to full pool due to drought.  Just 100cfs released unnecessarily amounts to about 60million gallons of water being thrown away daily. This tells me that we need to go to the minimum demonstrated safe release rate of 3600cfs as soon as the lakes can no longer be held to full pool due to a drought.  And we need to look at whether even lower release rates would be acceptable.  For the benefit of those who feel dropping all the way to 3600cfs is too much, stop and think of what the river used to be like during droughts before the dams were built.  This is not denying the river water. Rather it is guaranteeing adequate water even in times of severe drought.