Cumberland/Wolf River Dam - repairs

[riverman]

They're not pulling it down at all right now. I was on the river twice last week. You can see the five day forecast here: http://www.orn.usace.army.mil/hh/products/memrvrbna.txt

These are really low numbers and if you look at the graph of the lake level here: http://www.orn.usace.army.mil/hh/resplots/wol_a.html You'll see that it's at the lowest level that they want. To explain, there's two curves they try to follow. A top and a bottom SEPA curve. I really don't know what SEPA stands for but I DO know that they try to keep the lake level between the two.

Hope this helps!

[Chubminnow]

WLCK2 3.2/ 3.2/ 3.2/ 2.6/ 2.6:WOLF CREEK DAM

The numbers I've listed above came directly from the link you gave me...I have no idea what they represent...can you give me some insight?

[etcfishin]

I'll take a stab at this and someone correct me if I'm wrong. The set of numbers shows the average outflow of water from the dam per day. The first number is usually the current day if you look at the post after around 2:00PM. The 2nd number is tomorrow and so on and so forth. I believe that 3.2 is 3200 CFS. When Cumberland is running at full tilt it can spit out around 20,000 CFS or more, so you can see that the water release is at a much lower average. Now you can't really tell what the release schedule is from this data, it is just an average. They could relase 3,200 CFS all day or release 20,000 for just a few hours and shut it off, but you can make an assumption that the river level will be fairly low at these levels and shoals will be exposed at various points during the day. I will also say that these numbers will change each day and you can't really forecast the release levels for say 5 days out. You won't, however, see very drastic changes in these numbers unless we have heavy rain so you can make plans that if you see 3.2 four days out there's a pretty good chance that they won't be releasing a lot of water on that day. I do a lot of wading on Cumberland and generally when I see these numbers get around 7.0 and higher, there's not a whole lot of time for wading based on the water release schedule.

You should always check the TVA website the night before to get the actual water release for the next day. It usually updates for the next day in the early afternoon. I've never really seen them make changes to this schedule within 24 hours, but you should always be aware of changing water conditions. Would be interested to get a more scientific explanation on the numbers, these are just my observations.

[Chubminnow]

I'll probably end up going on saturday 11/12...Contemplating either saturday or sunday, sunday sounds better to me because it's supposed to rain...but home life responsibilities are making me choose saturday instead...thanks for sharing the water flow information!