Lake draining also blamed on drought, leaky dam

By DAVE HAMRICK
Staff Writer

No big mystery... it seems to be a combination of drought, a leaking dam and industrious beavers that emptied Lake Bennett in the Crystal Lakes subdivision on Ga. Highway 54, according to state and local officials.

Residents and owners of the Olde Mill Steakhouse, a scenic restaurant that overlooks the 150-year-old dam that created Lake Bennett, have been baffled in recent weeks because the lake, which has withstood many a drought, suddenly went dry.

Dozens of large fish have died, and Olde Mill owners Neil and Kay Davis have spent hours cleaning up the carnage. They've been looking for answers, and have called in state agencies and county experts to try and find them.

This past weekend, Davis and neighbors cleared out several beaver dams on Sandy Creek, which feeds the lake, and life began to return.

“We did get some water in the lake,” said Kay Davis. “The fish stopped dying because we got some oxygen in the lake, and that buys a little bit of time,” she said.

Her husband is “trying to continue to do some repairs to the dam,” she added. The ancient dam has been leaking for decades, and Davis is taking advantage of the low water to try and plug some holes, she said. It's difficult, because the dam is nothing more than a pile of rocks with some concrete in it, but they'll do the best they can, she said.

“There just isn't any water,” said Fayetteville Water Department director Rick Eastin last week during an inspection tour of some of the headwaters of Whitewater Creek, another tributary that feeds the lake. The untrained eye could see old water marks and could tell that water levels in every tributary had dropped by more than half.

“This year, I've seen streams that usually flow well even in dry conditions, but now there's hardly any flow at all,” said James Elliott, the state Environmental Protection Division's agent for Fayette and surrounding areas.

Elliott is investigating whether a new concrete culvert that channels Sandy Creek under Sandy Creek Road might have been built a little higher than the old culvert, and thus might be holding back some of the water, but he said it's unlikely to be causing much of the problem in any case.

“That's an 80-acre lake,” he said. “I didn't see that much of a problem,” he said of the culvert.

State Department of Natural Resources experts are studying the dead fish to make sure they didn't die from pollution, he said, adding that inspection of the surrounding area didn't suggest any such thing. “It's pretty clear that they died from lack of oxygen,” he said, “but you have to check to make sure.”

The only permanent solution, said Kay Davis, is rain. Clearing out the beavers will release some pent up water, but that will eventually be used up unless nature replaces it.

“It's just a combination of things,” she said.