Lakes slow to rise: Winter drought still affecting water levels.
“We are finally able to evenly split the river inflows between the three pools, but for a few weeks the physical configuration of the canals and structures had prevented that,” he said.
“The simple reason is the water was too low in the canals between the Floral City and Inverness pools for it to flow at the rate we wanted it to, because of the recent drought,” he said.
We’ve also seen more rainfall on the southern lakes (Floral City) this summer, as compared to the rest of the lake chain.” Specifically, the Floral City pool received 24 inches of rain since June 1.
During the week of Aug. 20-26, about 100 million gallons of water a day was flowing into the Tsala Apopka chain of lakes from the Withlacoochee River, and SWFWMD was splitting that flow evenly among the three pools; about 33 million gallons per pool.
“That’s a pretty good increase just in the past week with the Withlacoochee River continuing to rise,” Fulkerson said last week.
Those natural losses are slightly less than river inflows for the Floral City and Inverness pools, but exceed the river inflows for the Hernando pool because of its size.
River inflows are not enough to replenish the lakes.
An inch of rain is equivalent to 4, 3 and 5 days of river inflows for the Floral City, Inverness, and Hernando pools, respectively.
“The combination of rainfall directly on the lakes and inflow from the river is what we need to continue to raise the lakes this summer/fall,” Fulkerson said.