Below normal — 05/20/08

May 19, 2008 03:00 pm

— Businesses on Lake Cumberland learned a tough lesson last summer: When the water level drops, the tourists stay home. With the lake’s water level to again be below normal this summer, those who depend on tourism for their livelihood are anticipating another down year.
But there is hope for the future: The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers says repairs to Wolf Creek Dam should be completed so that the lake’s water level should be back to near normal before the end of the 2008 tourist season. That should mean a little better summer vacation season than in 2007 for the marinas, motels, restaurants and other tourist businesses on the largest man-made lake in the eastern United States.
The businesses experienced a huge decline in 2007 after the Corps lowered the lake’s water level by 40 feet. “I guarantee you that we were all down about 30 percent,” said John Meincken, general manager at Jamestown Resort and Marina in Russell County.
Many people hoped that after months of repairs on the dam, the Corps would raise the lake level 5 to 10 feet in time for this year’s boating season, but repairs haven’t gone as quickly as anticipated.
For more than a year, contractors have been drilling holes into rocks under the dam and pumping in liquid cement — more than 700,000 gallons so far. As contractors have drilled holes, they’ve found more spaces underground that need to be filled, said Allison Jarrett, a spokeswoman for the Corps of Engineers.
That means the dam was in worse condition than even the Corps thought. Clearly, the Corps made the right decision in lowering the level of the lake to repair the aging dam.
When tourism on the lake began to drop off last summer, the administration of former Gov. Ernie Fletcher joined with area businesses in launching an extensive advertising campaign to convince people that the lake was hardly a dry hole and remained a wonderful recreational area — a great place to take a vacation. But that campaign had only limited results. Families that had been vacationinfg on the lake for years, went elsewhere.
Things are looking a little better for this year. Still, it will likely be 2009 before things return to normal on Lake Cumberland. Until then, many businesses will continue to tread water in hopes of keeping their financial heads above water until the tourists return in large numbers a year from now.