Lake Lanier Water Quantity

Hot Issues for Lake Lanier

Lake Lanier levels are important to those who enjoy the aesthetic and recreational benefits of the Lake. Lake Lanier receives approximately eight million visits per year and has a recreation economic impact of $5.5 billion.

High lake levels have a significant positive impact on the desirability of the lake, the visits to the lake and the recreation economy the lake produces.

Lake levels are influenced by several things, including the amount of water coming to the lake from rain on its watershed, Buford Dam peak power generation releases, water supply withdrawals from the lake and the Chattahoochee River, releases for minimum river flows and releases for downriver navigation.

Lake levels are also impacted by the Tri-States Water Wars have been going on for 13+ years, without agreement between Georgia, Florida and Alabama. The LLA has intervened in this case and is monitoring the progress of the main players (the above states and the US Army Corps of Engineers) in this action. In net, Florida and Alabama want more water from Lanier during drought times, and they are trying to tell Georgia and the Corps of Engineers how to manage the water levels at Lanier. This issue will probably drag out for some time, even perhaps going to the US Supreme Court. Federal Judge Bowdre has challenged the parties to enter into mediation in order to try to settle the case. We have petitioned the mediator to allow LLA to participate in the mediation. The effort was supposed to have concluded by August 31, 2006, but Judge Bowdre extended the deadline until November 30, 2006 at the beginning of September.

Lake water quantity levels are monitored by the US Army Corps of Engineers and records since 1956 of elevation, inflow, discharge, generation and rainfall are listed on their Web site.

In 2006, several factors have contributed to low lake water quantity levels. In May and June, the US Army Corps of Engineers was ordered by Judge Bowdre to release additional waters for sufficient flow in the Apalachicola to allow endangered gulf sturgeon to spawn and to protect endangered mussels, fat threeridge and purple bankclimbers). In June, the Corps discovered that a faulty gauge had erroneously let out 1.9ft of water from Lake Lanier before the calibration error was detected. See Lake Lanier Water Level Reading Error Additionally, North Georgia is in a moderate draught and south of Atlanta is experiencing a severe drought.

On August 8, 2006, Senators Saxby Chambliss & Johnny Isakson and Congressman Nathan Deal hosted a Congressional Field Hearing of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee (link) to discuss the management of Lake Lanier and Georgia’s water resource needs at Riverside Military Academy.

Lake Lanier is part of the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee- Flint River System (ACF) that stretches from North Georgia to the Gulf of Mexico. The Chattahoochee River, originating in the North Georgia mountains, and the Flint River originating in the Atlanta area, flow south until they join at the Florida border to become the Apalachicola River that flows through the panhandle of Florida to the Gulf of Mexico.

During normal times the flows from the Chattahoochee and Flint Rivers are approximately the same at the point they come together to form the Apalachicola River. So, if the Apalachicola flows at 10,000 cubic feet per second (cfs), about 5,000 cfs is supplied from the Chattahoochee and 5,000 cfs is supplied from the Flint.

Several reservoirs have been built on the Chattahoochee River to store water for many purposes, thereby allowing saving water during wet times and releasing reservoir water during dry times to support the requirements put on the river system.

Some of the main uses for water taken from the reservoirs are: electric power generation; provide river depth downstream for navigation (float barges); irrigation (mostly in the Flint River area); input to water supplies and to provide minimum river flows to assimilate waste discharges.

There are four major water storage reservoirs on the Chattahoochee River, Lanier, West Point, George and Seminole. Lanier contains about 65% of the total reservoir storage on the Chattahoochee River system; therefore Lanier must supply much of the water to augment river flows for dry weather uses.

The total watershed of the ACF is about 20,000 square miles, and the runoff from those 20,000 square miles provides the water to the ACF river system. When there is an abundance of rain the runoff from the watershed provides more than enough water in the river system, and some of that excess water is saved in the reservoirs. When there is a lack of rain and the rivers are receiving much less runoff from the watershed, water is released from the reservoirs to supplement the smaller runoff to provide greater river flows.

Because the Lake Lanier watershed of 1040 square miles is only about 5% of the total ACF watershed, and because Lanier is a large portion of the total storage on the river system, we see significant fluctuations in Lake Lanier levels. In other words, there is a huge reliance on water from 5% of the watershed to satisfy the dry weather uses on the other 95% of the watershed. Because of its relatively small watershed, Lake Lanier is slow to refill. By comparison, the much smaller Lake Allatoona (25% the capacity of Lake Lanier) has a watershed about the same size as Lanier, and therefore fills much faster for the same amount of rainfall.



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