Money For Minimum Flow

[Flippin]

So with min flow, will the water level on the White river stay at a constant level and no longer have the big flucuations in water levels?

[Phil Lilley]

Money is for moving roads and Corp facilities up (elevation) to allow for the 5 feet rise. Plus there's some maintenance issues at the dam(s) to allow low flow.

[Dave Cook]

I was fishing the White this weekend. The water had been off for 3 or 4 days, so I guess it was as low as it could go. As a wade fisherman I thought the fishing was fantastic. I don't see how minimum flow helps anyone except boaters. The amount of extra water proposed for minimum flow takes away most of the wadable water from the Norfork and White that you find now when the power is off. The people (I assume mostly boaters) in Arkansas have lobbied and gotten what they wanted.

I have never heard what I consider to be common sense about the river flow in all the minimum flow discussion. In cold weather months, the trout have seemed to do just fine with no minimum flow being dictated. They don't have any thermal stress to deal with. During the hot months, it makes perfect sense to increase the minimum cfs release to help extend healthy water temperatures farther downstream. Also, minimum flow does nothing about the low oxygen problem experienced every fall.

All I have ever heard is let's increase the minimum cfs all the time.

And most the money appropriated for minimum flow goes to the power company to compensate them for lost revenue for the water from the power pool that they no longer control. Remember, the Corp decides water release when the lakes are above power pool and the power company decides water releases when the lakes are at or below power pool.

The part about raising the level of Bull Shoals is to raise the level of the power pool, which only decreases the amount of flood pool that the Corp can manage. No one is going to raise the top of the flood pool. Not without rebuilding the dam and getting additional easements along the lake shore.

So I am glad Missouri and Taneycomo are not part of this plan. Taneycomo has very little wadable water and boaters can already boat just about anywhere they want to. Below Table Rock you have a lake. Below Bull Shoals, you have a river. You don't need the same plan for both situations.