Lake Cumberland Low Water Level

Lake Cumberland Low Water Level, originally uploaded by John Beagle.

You can see ridges where the water level was before and during the damn lowering of the lake.

Lake Cumberland Facts (courtesy U.S. Army Corps of Engineers)

Lake Cumberland was filled with water in December 1950, and was constructed primarily for flood control and the production of hydroelectric power at a cost of about $80.4 million. Its shoreline measures 1,085 miles and the lake is spread over 50,250 acres at the top of the power pool.

Wolf Creek Dam ranks 22nd in the One Hundred Largest Dams in the U.S. and required 11,568,900 cubic yards of material in construction. It is over a mile long at 5,736 feet. (The concrete portion is 1,796 feet long; the earthfill portion, 3,940 feet.) It is 258 feet high at its tallest point.

The reservoir ranks 9th in the U.S. in size with a capacity of 6,089,000 acre-feet, enough water to cover the entire Commonwealth of Kentucky to a depth of 3 inches. That’s roughly 1.9 trillion gallons.

The six turbines at Lake Cumberland are capable of producing 270 megawatts of electricity, enough to supply the needs of an average city with a population of 375,000.

The power generating capacity is now considered “dead” because it is below 673 feet.

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