People who know the Chattahoochee River say it’s a deceiver. It’s a wild river, they say, masquerading as a city’s serene stream. It topples boats, strands anglers.
And sometimes, as on June 3, it kills.
Anna Van Horn, 9, of Peachtree City, was tubing on the Chattahoochee with two adults and three siblings that day. They hadn’t been there long when Buford Dam, three miles upstream at Lake Lanier, opened its gates.
“The water started to rise and the party started to move faster,” reported the state Department of Natural Resources, one of several agencies that investigated the accident. Anna, clad in a life jacket, fell from her tube.
She grabbed a tree, reported the DNR, but “the water rose around her.” She was found dead downsteam, without the life jacket.
An investigation into the child’s death continued late last week.
The fatality was another reminder that the river isn’t forgiving. Despite an array of warnings about water releases from the dam — sirens, signs, radio broadcasts, online messages and more — the Chattahoochee continues claiming victims.
Anna’s drowning death was the first this year that occurred in rising waters during a dam discharge. Last year, two people drowned during the releases. Seventeen have drowned on the river since 2000, but federal officials didn’t know how many of those deaths came during dam discharges.
“When those gates open, you don’t stand a chance if you’re out there,” said angler Bob Dejardin, fly-fishing just downstream from the dam one day last week. “It’s really dangerous.” Federal officials said the company that rented Anna and her friends tubes followed rules established by the National Park Service.
Among those rules: making sure tubers know about the dam discharges, ensuring customers are wearing proper flotation devices, and not allowing any tubing north of the Ga. 20 bridge two hours before a dam discharge. Anna’s group entered the river just below the bridge, where there’s no requirement to leave the water when the sirens sound.
Power and water flow
It’s worth the drive to admire Buford Dam, about 40 miles north of downtown Atlanta. In its center is the Powerhouse, with towering gates that hide electrical turbines. Through them flows so much water that discharges are measured in feet, not gallons.
Completed in 1957 by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the dam generates power and regulates water levels in the lake and downstream. On hot days, during peak demand for electrical power, the dam’s gates regularly open, said Chris Lovelady, Lake Lanier’s assistant manager of operations.
The discharges move slowly — about 3 mph — and can take nearly 12 hours to reach Morgan Falls Dam, 36 miles downstream.
The gates usually don’t open at night, when discharges would be safer, because there’s less demand for power or regulating water levels in cooler, darker hours, Lovelady said.
Lovelady, who has been at the lake for 27 years, believes the corps has done everything reasonable to warn people about the dam’s discharges.
Sirens sound about five minutes before the gates open. Their 30-second blast carries more than a mile downstream. They sound 10 times during a typical discharge, howling every three and a half minutes.
“It’s hard to imagine how that could be more effective,” Lovelady said.
Other measures include multiple signs telling people to leave the water whenever the sirens sound.
The signs are posted at Lower Pool Park, immediately downstream from the dam, where a discharge can raise the water level by as much as 11 feet.
Travelers near the dam can tune to AM 1610 for the latest discharge information. The corps lists online information about dam openings, or the public can call 770-945-1466 for a daily water-release schedule.
“I wouldn’t put my foot in the river until I called that number,” Lovelady said.
The corps requires visitors to wear life vests if they are in the nearly three-mile stretch of river winding from Buford Dam to the Ga. 20 bridge.
Municipalities downstream also post signs warning about discharges.
Despite those measures, said Lovelady, “people don’t always pay attention” to the warnings.
That inattention can be hazardous, said Patty Wissinger, superintendent of the Chattahoochee National Recreation Area, which encompasses a 48-mile stretch of the river from Buford Dam to Peachtree Creek in Atlanta.
“It’s cold. It’s rocky,” she said. “Even though we’re in an urban area, it’s still a wild river.”
And a cruel one, said Capt. Jason Shivers of the Forsyth County Fire Department. Its water rescue unit found Anna Van Horn. “It’s horrible,” he said, “the things that can happen out there.”
‘Definitely scary’
Sugar Hill resident Michawne Clark sat on a blanket at Lower Pool Park on a recent sunbaked morning. Her two sons and a nephew walked barefoot at the river’s edge. The dam was scheduled to open in two hours.
“As soon as those sirens go off, we’re out of here,” said Clark, 34. “It’s definitely scary.”
That fear tends to subside farther downstream, as the river widens and the dam’s discharges spread out. There, the water rises more gradually.
At Rogers Bridge Park in Duluth, 12 miles below the dam, Tony Cox, Brenda Dobrovicsova and Meg Avery dropped bright-yellow tubes into the rivers’s green shallows and prepared to drift downstream. They were aware that the river had claimed a life less than a week earlier, but weren’t worried.
“You can’t live your life being frightened,” said Avery, 54. “I could get hit by a bus tomorrow.”
Eight miles below that park, at Jones Bridge Park in Norcross, Ranada Howell tipped her toes in water sluicing through a rocky channel. About 40 others stood on rocks in the river, or splashed in its shallows.
It was midafternoon. The dam had opened an hour earlier. A wave slowly headed her way.
Did she know the dam’s discharge schedule?
Howell smiled and shook her head. No.
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