Corps: Beaver Lake low but not record-setting

Lake levels at Beaver Lake, as seen Tuesday from a boat landing near the Arkansas 12 bridge, are about 7 feet below seasonal levels, according to the Army Corps of Engineers.

Lake levels at Beaver Lake, as seen Tuesday from a boat landing near the Arkansas 12 bridge, are about 7 feet below seasonal levels, according to the Army Corps of Engineers.

Thursday, July 26, 2012

— The dry summer means Beaver Lake is running a few feet lower than normal, but the lake is not deemed to be afflicted by drought under the federal government’s standards, an official with the Army Corps of Engineers said.

That’s also the case for the Corps’ White River system of lakes such as Table Rock, Bull Shoals, Norfork, Greers Ferry and Clearwater lakes, said a spokesman for its Little Rock District, Laurie Driver.

“This is pretty normal for a typical dry summer,” Driver said.

At 7 a.m. Wednesday, Beaver’s lake levels stood at 1,114.08 feet, more than 7 feet below the Engineers’ target of 1,121.4 feet above mean sea level, Driver said. The federal agency takes its measurements as close as possible to the top of the Beaver Lake’s conservation pool, she said, referring to one of its several “mission” levels.

There’s a top layer used for “flood risk reduction,” asecond conservation-pool layer, and inactive storage at the lake bottom, she said.

The current levels don’t make the Top 5 lowest levels recorded for Beaver Lake,Driver said.

The lowest ever occurred in January 1977, when the lake fell to 1,092.8 feet and the next-lowest was in December 1971, at 1,099.7 feet.

Many residents might remember the third-lowest lake levels, which hit 1,105.3 feet in March 2006, partially exposing the ruins of a 20th-century resort townknown as Monte Ne that was flooded when Beaver Lake was built.

Today, only the top of Monte Ne’s amphitheater peeks out above the lake water.

“A lot of people are coming out trying to find it, but there’s really nothing to see right now,” Alan Bland, a park ranger with the Army Corps, said of Monte Ne.

He also recalled winter 1976 and spring 1977 as the lake’s lowest point.

“Then we could see all of Monte Ne,” Bland said. “We hope that doesn’t happen again.”

The fourth- and fifth-lowest levels were close contenders for the Top 5, at 1,105.4 feet in December 1983 and 1,105.9 feet in January 1981, respectively, Driver said.

Mike Wahl, who’s worked on Beaver Lake’s docks for more than two decades, agreed with others that high water during the past five years may make the low-water situation seem more dire than it really is.

“There’s a lot of pointssticking out,” he said, referring to sandbars and small islands normally buried underwater.

“The old timers who have been here awhile know where they are,” Wahl said, though they pose a potential safety hazard for others.

“You can end up in 6 inches of water really fast,” the owner of Dock Maintenance Co. added. “You have to watch your depth-finder.”

Mike Whitehouse, who with his wife, Susan, has owned Hickory Creek Marina in Lowell for the last two years, said he’s been told people have become accustomed to the higher levels of the last four or five years.

“As far as the lake levels this year, I like it a lot better than last year,” he said.

Whitehouse said the business had six parking places last year, while it has 90 spaces now.

“I waded in the water up to my chest just to get on my ramps that I had extended 100 feet past the normal spots,” he said.

Business was down in 2011, he said. “We did $3,000 in the whole month of May, and can do that now in half a day on Saturdays,” he said.

It was so busy this past Saturday that one of his tanks ran out of gas.

Other record lake lows include:

Table Rock stood at 910.68 feet Wednesday morning. Its lowest recorded point was in February 1965, when it hit 881.5 feet, Driver said.

Bull Shoals - which like Table Rock meanders over the Arkansas-Missouri border - was at 650.83 feet Wednesday. It hit its low point in September 1954, at 587.5 feet.

Norfork, at 547.34 feet Wednesday, also saw its lowest point in September 1954, when it dropped to 509.8 feet.

For more than a decade, Beaver Lake has offered nearly 2 million acre-feet of water storage, Driver said.

Of that, inactive water storage accounts for nearly 730,000 acre-feet at the bottom of the reservoir. Such storage isn’t allocated for any use, but rather is needed to add enough height in the reservoir so that water from the conservation pool can fall through the dam’s penstocks, or pipes.

On the next level up rests the conservation pool, consisting of more than 925,000 acre-feet of water. This level contains all the water allocated for human consumption, of which almost 800,000 acre-feet is dedicated to hydroelectric power use and just under 130,000 acre-feetmakes up the drinking water supply.

At the top of the reservoir is more than 285,000 feet of what the Army Corps terms its “flood pool,” an area that serves as storage capacity in the lake in case of heavy rain.

No storage at the dam is dedicated specifically to recreation purposes, Driver said. Recreation such as fishing and boating is affected only when water levels are extremely high or extremely low.

Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 07/26/2012