WINNEBAGO COUNTY, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) – Water levels on Lake Winnebago are higher than the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers would like.
Officials say they’ve opened all the gates they safely can at dams to help bring those levels down, but engineers don’t expect levels to drop anytime soon.
While there may be room for concern, some residents living near the lake say they aren’t.
Resident Warren Lefever of Menasha tells FOX 11…
“In 25 years of living here, I’ve never once had water up where I was even concerned.”
More water is now flowing into Lake Winnebago than is flowing out, causing the water to rise.
Chadwick Shaw, with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, tells FOX 11 they drew the lake down to 1.4 feet at its Oshkosh measuring site last month, with the expectation that mother nature would take its course.
“As soon as we got down to that number, we started to see the warmup come and the snowmelt runoff starts. The lake has risen to about 2.5, as of today.”
This isn’t troubling residents like Lefever, who lives just feet away from the lake in Menasha.
“The water level at this end of the lake…at this time of the year, the water is down, so it doesn’t come up that high. Actually, before we get flooded, the town of Appleton would be, because we’re up that much higher.”
Lake Winnebago water levels are controlled by the dams in Neenah and Menasha. Shaw says all six gates at the Menasha Dam are open but, in Neenah, only seven of the nine “needle gates” are open.
“It’s kind of the emergency two gates to open those, and it’s because we get flooding immediately impacting a couple of the paper mills right there adjacent and the ThedaCare hospital starts to see flood impacts in their parking lot, and it can come up higher than that.”
With recent rains and the melting snow rapidly flowing, Shaw says currently the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has done all it can do to lower the levels.
But he says there’s still at least 15 inches of snow in the northern portion of the basin waiting to melt.
“That still needs to come into the basin, so it’s going to be, unfortunately, awhile before conditions return to what we would consider normal.”
The Army Corps of Engineers says high flow on the Fox River may cause dangerous conditions. It’s asking people to be careful on or near the river, especially areas closer to the dams.
