Lake Lanier continues to drop at a rate of about a foot a week as the Army Corps of Engineers steps up water releases to keep stream levels up in a drought.
As of Tuesday the lake, Atlanta's getaway body of water located about 40 miles north of downtown, was down 12 feet from the last time it was at full pool in May.
It’s predicted the level will drop another 2 feet by the end of the month, so much so that the annual Lanier Parade of Lights -- where boats take to the water at night in early December in a flotilla with Christmas lights -- has been canceled.
That’s the bad news. The good news is the receding water has exposed or brought close to the surface underwater hazards that can be marked and identified with buoys. For about the past month, that’s been Rick Marton’s mission.
Most days Marton, a 69-year-old retired airline executive, boat pilot and volunteer with the U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary, consults a map that shows where hazards were exposed during the drought of 2007-2009, then heads out in his tug boat Little Toot to attach buoys at the sites.
On Tuesday morning he marked a spot that a few weeks ago was safe boating on a lake where most boats only need four feet of water to navigate safely.
“It’s just so crazy when the lake starts dropping like this,” Marton said. “People are used to getting in a boat and going and once they get away from shore it’s safe, but when it’s this low, it’s not.”
Many boats on Lanier have depth finders, Marton said, but they only measure the depth of water under the boat, not in front of it. By the time the depth finder alerts a boater that the water is only two feet deep, it's too late.
"It doesn't take much speed or momentum to do a lot of damage in a hurry," Marton said. "We had a 65-foot boat hit rocks in July and it just tore both engines off it. That was before it started dropping like this.”
Marton estimated he’s attached 25 to 30 buoys around the lake so far and he figures the rate will pick up as the lake continues to drop. The buoys are provided by the Corps of Engineers, which manages the lake as well as the water releases.
Those releases, along with the drought, have dropped the lake to levels approaching the drought of 2007-2009, when it hit a record low almost 20 feet below full pool.
“If it goes down another five or six feet, it won’t be just rocks and low spots, we’ll have to deal with the tops of trees” that were left standing when the lake was filled in the 1950s, Marton said.
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