― NEWS & ANNOUNCEMENTS ―
Lake Level Summary- 6/5-6/12
As a result of tardy postings of some recent gate opening actions, plus the loss of 11 actual lake level updates to the lake level website during a critical time Monday and Tuesday (resulting from an equipment supplier’s remote actions), the following is an attempt to summarize key lake level events from the past week:
Prior to Friday, 6/6, there had been one gate opened full for several days. Following several hours of periodic rainfall, by midnight of Thursday, 6/5, the lake level rose to reach the upper guide at 714.25’.
With rain continuing on Friday, 6/6, another gate was opened around noon, with two more opened by late afternoon, bringing the total to 4 gates full open. By the end of the day on Saturday, 6/7, with more rainfall, the lake level rose to 714.3’, just above the high guide.
With rain continuing, another gate was opened on Saturday, 6/7, bringing the total to 5 gates full open.
On Monday morning, with forecasts for late day potential flooding, a 6th gate was opened.
At 3:00 PM on Monday, our lake level page stopped updating (caused by an equipment supplier trying to solve another customer’s problem, and instead, made our equipment incapable of updating.
Multiple inches of rain hammered the entire watershed during a very few hours of Monday early evening, and with the soils being already totally saturated, every gully and stream was soon seeing extreme waterflows rarely seen before. This caused substantial damage to personal property, roads, and resulted in the lake level peaking at around 715’, which was reached in the early morning hours of Tuesday, 6/10. This level is significantly below any previous critical flood levels and below the “mean high water level”. Since the automated lake level system was not functioning, fixed lake level gauges at various locations around the lake were utilized.
Over the next 24 hours, with no rainfall, and 6 gates full open, there was basically no change in lake level (continuing water inflow matched outflow through the gates into the outlet --- approaching 1,000 cu. Ft. per second).
By Thursday, 6/12, with 6 gates still open and no rain since Monday, the lake level had dropped only about 4 inches from the peak level reached late Monday or early Tuesday. Therefore, … we obviously were still experiencing significant water inflow.
As the lake level continues to slowly drop into the objectives area, expect the gates to be closed appropriately.
*Thank you KLOC and the Penn Yan public works staff for keeping the lake level well below critical flood stage during this most recent extreme rain event. Streams and creeks were the flooding and property damage sources, not the lake. And thank you D. Scott Demmin for making our website lake level history reflect what actually happened.
