Recent heavy rains caused a small dam to fail on Lake Alice near Cumming, allowing an untold amount of sludge and sediment to ooze along Little Ridge Creek into Lake Lanier, turning the water “pumpkin orange” in one cove.
The dam breach, which occurred May 19, washed out parts of Sanders Road and carried sediment through the creekbed into a cove on the southeast side of Lanier.
“My understanding is this is going to be a long-term situation,” said resident Mike Leahy, one of about 50 homeowners in the affected area.
Leahy said he bought the lakefront property last year and has had little response from authorities as to how the issue is going to be corrected.
“Why can’t someone step forward and stop the potential environmental disaster before it spirals further out of control?” he said.
The 10-acre lake is jointly owned by Martha Mashburn and the City of Cumming, according to Forsyth County records. Ownership of the dam itself is less clear because the city’s boundary comes to a point near its location. Attempts to reach Mashburn were unsuccessful, and the city did not return repeated requests for comment.
Tom Woosley, program manager with the Safe Dams Program of the Georgia Environmental Protection Division, said the small structure did not fall under the department’s regulatory authority. Only Category I dams, those that would threaten lives downstream, receive regular EPD inspections, he said.
“Really the burden falls to the owner of the property to be responsible for any of the cleanup,” he said.
Bert Langley, district coordinator with EPD, said it has been hard to determine jurisdiction for the incident, but his department is on scene this week.
“We should have probably been on this a little earlier … and that’s one of the reasons we’ve revitalized our emergency response program,” he said. “We realized we’re not as prepared as we used to be.”
As an unregulated dam, and an act of God causing it to fail, it becomes a question as to how its regulated, Langley said.
“The county has indicated to us they have a contractor who will attempt to install some [devices] to help minimize any more loss of sediment,” he said.
Jason Ulseth, technical programs director for the nonprofit Chattahoochee Riverkeepers, lives within three miles of the site and remarked on the amount of damage the dam breach had on the creek.
“The amount of erosion is incredible in the stream channel,” he said.
Signs of trouble were in the offing for several years, he said.
“Over the years, there was a large commercial development built across the street from this lake with a large impervious surface,” he said. “Now when it rains, the water hits all these impervious surfaces, then goes into the lake.”
On May 19, Ulseth said, he measured 8 inches of rainfall overnight.
Joanna Cloud, executive director of the 1,700-member Lake Lanier Association, said initial reports she received said there were some 50 tons of sediment deposited into the lake.
“That’s a very big concern for us because, first of all, you don’t want all that silt in the lake,” she said. “Second, there’s the concern about possible contaminants or pollutants coming in as well.”
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which operates the lake, says it cannot take pre-emptive action to protect itself in these cases.
“My guess is no one regulates it,” Corps spokesman Pat Robbins said. “We don’t have any authority to go on private property and do anything about it. There’s no law that allows us to do that.”
The Corps will have a say if the owners decide to rebuild the dam. Its regulatory division enforces federal clean-water standards to all waterways and must issue a permit for the new dam.
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