West Point Lake project managers say crowds were slow and attendance was light during last weekend’s Memorial Day holiday, but blame most of that on persistent rains.

After a two-year drought has begun to loosen its hold on the Southeast, most are thankful for a wet spring.

However, the same rain that has filled the lake - the level was reported at 634.87 feet above mean sea level Friday and could attract more visitors this summer - also may trigger the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to go back to managing the lake the old way.

The “old way” means that if the basin’s conservation storage rises to a high enough level, the current drought operations plan the corps adopted two years ago would be suspended and the corps would go back to using that storage instead of rain to provide the 5,000 cubic-feet-per-second minimum flow at Jim Woodruff Dam at Florida.

“If we continue to receive rain, we’ll be fine,” said Dick Timmerberg, executive director of the West Point Lake Coalition. “People are finally looking forward to returning to the lake now that there’s a full pool and a safe lake.”

But the drought taught everyone that relying on the best from Mother Nature isn’t the wisest course, and officials are worried what may happen if there’s a dry summer or fall. And local officials still question the science that went into the corps’ operating plan to begin with. The water initially was needed to supplement water for endangered sturgeon and mussels on the Apalachicola River. Since that initial fight, however, many other users along the basin have staked a claim to their own needs for higher flows.

No one locally minds sharing the water, but West Point Lake is the only corps-run lake in the Southeast authorized for recreation, so the local recreation and tourism economy took a huge hit during the drought.

Local officials want the corps - which manages this lake along with others in the Chattahoochee River basin - to manage the lakes equitably. However, with Lake Lanier north of At-lanta still down and recovering from the 2007 drought, it’s more likely that West Point Lake and Lake Eufaula downstream would “carry the freight” for the system.

“We are positive at the moment, but we worry what will happen in a dry fall,” said Joe Maltese, point-man on the lake for the city of LaGrange.

Jennifer Shrader can be reached at jshraderlagrangenews.com or (706) 884-7311, Ext. 236.