Ben Morgan first noticed something was really wrong on Lake Lanier near Atlanta over Labor Day Weekend. The summer of 2007 had been unusually hot and dry, and everybody knew that a drought was drawing the lake level down. But the lake, huge at 39,000 acres, always fluctuated by up to 12 feet a year and at first, he didn't pay it any mind.
Then Morgan, who owns and operates a towing company and has tooled around Lanier for his own pleasure on a houseboat for more than a decade, started getting more calls from boats running aground. That holiday weekend, he never stopped.
"We were pulling boats off what they normally thought was deep water, which used to be deep water, but wasn't anymore," he says. "This took everyone by surprise."
Boaters were hitting shoals that hadn't been there the week before. Or ramming into tree snags that had been submerged since the manmade lake was first filled in 1957.
"People were knocking their out–drives off, or damaging them to where they couldn't steer," Morgan says, "They were just going in circles, with the natural inertia of the boat."
LANIER AT RECORD LOW
Associated PressExposed lake bed and beached boat docks are shown at Lake Lanier in Cumming, Ga.
Harsh drought conditions in the south, combined with the need to protect endagered species, are causing Lake Lanier and other bodies of water to shrink to unprecedented levels.
Since Labor Day, the lake has fallen about an inch per week, which translates into nearly a new foot of shoreline. When it's full, the lake sits 1,072 feet above sea level. As of early January, it has dropped 20 feet, to 1,051, the lowest level ever.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has 475 permanent hazard markers on Lake Lanier. Right now, they're all several feet up in the air, says Michael Lapina, the Corps' chief park ranger in the Mobile District. As the water level drops, rangers go out everyday and mark new low water hazards. They've set 140 orange makers on 125 new hazards that are usually deep underwater.
"Lake Lanier is a pretty deep lake, so people are used to zooming around on their boats wherever they like," he says. "They have to be careful now. Being the size it is, there's still a lot of potential for boating, but there's also potential for accidents for people not familiar with the lake."
Lake Sidney Lanier, named for a 19th century Georgia poet, was dug out in the post World War II heyday of massive U.S. Army Corps of Engineers public works projects. More than 700 families were moved when Buford Dam was built and the lake was filled to provide hydroelectric power, drinking water to nearby Atlanta and, ironically, flood control. Part of the Corps' mandate was to ensure that enough water kept flowing down the Chattahoochee River through Alabama and Florida and out to the Gulf of Mexico to keep the downstream cities supplied with drinking water and oyster and mussel fishermen in business.
That means recreational boaters and those businesses that supply them aren't the only ones hurting. Downstream on the parched river system, there's little sympathy in some quarters.
