Lake leak fix is well underway

An unusual repair project is underway in the deep woods of Bleckley County.

The state is spending $2.3 million to fix leaks in the bed of the Ocmulgee Public Fishing Area, which had become a prime trophy bass spot when it closed in 2012.

Today, the upper end of the drained lake is practically a forest, and the dock where people once tossed lines into the water now juts out into a thicket of trees.

At the other end of the lake nearer the dam, earth-moving equipment roars over the area that was once under about 25 feet of water.

The project began in March and was slowed by spring rains, but dry weather of late has gotten it back on track. Completion had been scheduled for August, but it’s now looking more like September.

The lake is expected to reopen some time next spring thanks to the Georgia Department of Natural Resources Wildlife Resource Division taking the step of growing the fish ahead of time. Several hatcheries around the state, as well as the three-acre children’s pond at the lake, are growing fish to adult size for stocking once the lake refills.

Without that effort, the lake probably wouldn’t be opening until 2018, said Tim Bonvechio, senior fisheries biologist for the Georgia Department of Natural Resources Wildlife Resources Division.

He had been involved with the lake for about a year when the leak forced the state to shut it down. Before the lake level started dropping, he remembers seeing license plates from around the state in the parking lot. The lake would be full of boats, and frequently whoops would go out across the water as anglers celebrated hauling in a big one.

“It was really coming on as a high profile trophy bass fishery in the state of Georgia,” Bonvechio said as he watched the work going on recently. “We hope to bring that recipe back again.”

Peed Brothers, an earth-moving company from Butler, was awarded the contract to do the repair. The work is being done in an 18-acre area of the 106-acre lake. The repair area is along the center of the lake in the deepest portion.

The lake is located in the Ocmulgee Wildlife Management Area, at the Pulaski County line. It opened in 2006 and was stocked with large mouth bass, crappie, bream and catfish.

The first step in the repair project was to reroute the stream that runs through the middle of the lake. Then about two feet of the lake bed had to be removed.

The area is being covered with a geotechnical fabric similar to what is used to prevent runoff from construction sites. On a hill near the lake, a large area was cleared and red clay dirt is being trucked from there to cover the fabric.

The first layer of clay is 18 inches. That will be compacted, then another 18-inch layer will be added for a total of 3 feet of clay on top of the fabric.

Tim Herman, the project engineer, said the fabric isn’t intended to hold back the water. Water will actually flow through the fabric, he said. The purpose of the fabric is the hold back the dirt.

Previously lake water would start seeping into crevices in the limestone under the lake bed and into the aquifer below. As it did that, it would pull dirt with it, creating four large sinkholes. The fabric will hold back the clay layer, which will be far more dense that the dirt that was removed from the lake bed. The clay will be much more able to hold back the water than the porous dirt that was removed, Herman said.

A few months before the lake level started to drop in 2012, the state collected and tagged 180 fish by shocking an area to stun the fish. Of those, 15 were large-mouth bass that were 10 pounds or more. That was about 8 percent of the population.

“That is unheard of,” Bonvechio said. He said a typical well-managed lake would expect that number to be 2 or 3 percent.

A key reason for that is that the state stocked the lake at a low density to allow fish to grow to a large size.

It will take a few years to get back to that, he said, but he believes it will happen and it may be even better. Catfish were stocked in the lake before, but not this time. The catfish were competing too much with the bass for forage fish, so without the catfish the bass should thrive even better, he said.

“We want to put someone on the fish of a lifetime,” he said.

This story was originally published July 3, 2016 at 8:28 PM with the headline "Lake leak fix is well underway."