Potential 8-Year Lake Chatuge Drawdown Causing Alarm

Lake Chatuge’s future and those of the small-town economies that depend on it are currently under heavy discussion. The talks involve the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the lake’s 82-year-old spillway, and how making the area as safe as possible could cause serious issues for local businesses and homeowners, ones that will impact the area long term.

Community members, through a period of public comment and independent activism, have made their voices heard. The TVA initially announced it could potentially draw the lake down for as long as eight years to rebuild or rehabilitate the spillway for the purpose of bringing it inside the organization’s safety tolerances. Now, after the initial period of open comment, some of the concern has shifted more toward optimism.

Not only does it appear as if the length of the drawdown will be shorter than the maximum potential, maybe even to the point of not impacting the summer months, but at least three summers will pass before any extra water is let off Lake Chatuge to start the project.

“One of our main concerns is we do want to keep pressure on the TVA, but I also don’t want to scare people off from visiting the lake in the short term,” Kevin Clem, the owner of Boundary Waters Marina and spokesman for SaveLakeChatuge.org told GON. “Because the soonest they would do any of these projects is three years from now. We’re good this summer, next summer, and 2027 summer. The earliest anything would happen is the winter after 2027.”

According to Clem, who regularly communicates with the TVA, events like spillway failure at Lake Oroville in California and flooding from Hurricane Helene, which came much closer to home last September, has caused risk tolerances to change. That’s what puts the spillway in its managing organization’s crosshairs.

The TVA initially announced that it could need to let the lake down to 10 feet below low pool. Depending on your understanding of lake pools, that might or might not sound like much. According to Fish Chatuge Guide Caz Anderson, letting off 10 feet of water from its lowest operational level, the winter, would put it at 23 feet below full pool. He estimates that it could take away a third of the lake or more.

That would have a major impact on fishing in the area. According to Caz, the TVA has assured locals that it will lengthen some boat ramps so that the lake can still be accessed. It would also significantly decrease the degree of difficulty when it comes to finding and landing fish.

“Most of it is going to be defined river channels,” Caz said. “It’s going to be one of those deals where the brush and the typical stuff we target, it’s not going to be a thing. Some areas are going to be like shooting fish in a barrel. There’s going to be a lot of new points and things like that.”

Caz expects the fishing to be easier due to larger, easier-to-find congregations of baitfish as well as more visibility when it comes to the brushpiles and structure that fish have related to season after season. Due to that, shallow fishing will be better, but Caz won’t be sticking around.

Lake Chatuge fishing guide Caz Anderson.

As much as he’d love to enjoy fishing Chatuge and taking his clients out to do the same, letting the lake down in the summer months will severely impact his business. The economies of Towns County, Georgia and Clay County, North Carolina depend on tourism. It’s also a popular destination for retirement homes.

If docks are completely out of the water, banks turn dry and much of what was under water becomes visually unappealing mud, then tourism will take a significant hit. Fewer people means fewer guide opportunities and Caz has already made the decision to move his service to nearby lakes when and if the levels are intentionally dropped.

But as daunting as it all sounds, no final decisions have been made and there’s still optimism—both on the side of those who depend on the lake and the TVA.

There are five options on the table. Option A includes leaving the spillway as is and doing nothing. Options B and C call for different ways of rehabilitating the spillway, while options D and E call for complete reconstruction. The B and C options would require shorter drawdown times than D and E, but TVA spokesperson Adam May tells GON that getting the dam and spillway within its safety tolerances is of utmost importance.

“I would say options B through E are the ones that are under the most consideration,” Adam said in a telephone interview. “Option A, keeping it how it is and making repairs like we have been doing, to just maintain what we have, does not keep the spillway within the safety parameters that we feel comfortable with.”

The first public comment period ended on May 28. An economic impact study is being conducted as this article is being written, and Kevin Clem tells GON that boats are currently perusing the lake to map it out. Surveyors were in his cove as recently as June 3.

The TVA expects a final decision to be made toward the end of 2025 or early on in 2026. Another period of public comment, per Adam, will be opened before that final decision is made. Response during the first period was robust.

There’s still some frustration on the part of locals based on how this has been handled already. On one hand, Kevin and everyone else in the Lake Chatuge area are completely on board with keeping those who reside downstream from the spillway safe. They want to avoid a catastrophic failure of the structure as much as anyone.

But at the same time, the initial announcements, which are “upper bounds” projections according to the TVA, caused some serious panic amongst the public. Per Kevin, the real estate market and tourism have already been impacted. Combine the lofty projections with the fact that the TVA has stated, on record, that it doesn’t view the spillway’s condition as emergent, and the locals believe there has been some undue, untimely panic already.

“You can’t bankrupt a town for a non-emergency,” Kevin said.

Concerns have been calmed a little already. The more that information has been effectively communicated, the more those close to the north Georgia lake have learned that a letdown might not be needed at all between Memorial Day and Labor day, the the area’s most important time of the year.

They’ve been read in on the fact that the project is at least three years out and how the TVA started from a worst-case-scenario position and is trending more positive. Then there’s the next public comment period after the first appears to have already made an impact. May says the TVA went into the process with the intent of listening to nearby residents heavily on its mind.

“We did not enter this with a decision already made,” Adam said. “I can assure you of that.