June 24 – 30, 2022Vol. 24, No. 3

Higher Water Than Needed

Dam at Belgrade Lakes Village, on the stream that flows from Great Pond into Long Pond.

by Dick Greenan

As of this writing, believe it or not, all of our pond water levels are actually higher than need be with the gates partially open — I can’t believe I am writing this at this time of the summer!

Thanks to these persistent showers! Great Pond’s Village dam is currently 3.12″ above full pond with the main gate opened 6″. Long Pond’s Wings Mill dam is exactly right at 3.36″, also above full pond with Gate 1 opened 12″. Salmon/McGrath is now 1.25″ above full pond with its single gate still opened the mandated 1 cfs flow. Our neighbors on Messalonskee are down 4.44″ below full which is just a fact of life with its electricity generation needs.

Our precipitation for the past 10 days was a whopping 2.73″ of rain which has accounted for our open gates. But we are looking at only 0.43″ for the next 10 days so you can see the developing trend. FYI, our normal weekly precipitation during the summer is supposed to be 0.875″, so you can see we are running so far, about average. Our long-term forecast is still calling for an average 20% less precipitation so we will be resorting back to our “save the water” mode once we get our pond levels back to the 3″-above-full-pond objective.

If you have a particular questions regarding our Dams and/or water levels, please email your inquiry to dickgreenan@outlook.com, and we will try to answer your question either in this column or via email.

Enjoy your summer! It should be beautiful.

Dick Greenan is secretary to the Belgrade Lakes Watershed Dams Committee. He submitted this report on June 15, 2022.

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