Wednesday October 23, 2024
ABC 10 —
A combination of warmer climate and water mismanagement has led to the draining of Eagle Lake near Susanville.
While changes could still be made to preserve what’s left, the Bureau of Land Management says getting the lake levels to where they were a century ago would take decades of rain without evaporation — and that’s a scenario that just won’t play out.
Evaporation and winds drop lake levels at Eagle Lake several feet every year.
“You get 3-5 feet of loss every year so you have to balance that with recharge, and if you don’t, then the lake just gets smaller and smaller,” said Stan Bales with the Bureau of Land Management.
Recharging the lake with water is difficult. Eagle Lake sits on the leeward side of the lower Cascade Mountain Range. It’s what’s considered the rain shadow side of a mountain where precipitation hits the area, but it’s not nearly as much as the windward side. You might consider it the leftover rain from a storm. Filling the lake becomes harder due to the smaller rain and snow totals.