Well the beach area of Smithville Lake will likely disappear again - there were some really heavy rains along the upper Little Platte basin that feeds into Smithville Lake - radar estimates show amounts up to 6 inches - that along with 2 hours of tornado and severe thunderstorm warnings this evening, Saturday 5-29-04.

Should mean the lake stage rises rapidly and stays up - they can dump the excess pretty fast and it's situations exactly like this where the Lake and dam earn their keep. Twenty years ago the town of Smithville have faced serious flooding but the Lake will easily hold the water in the flood pool and they can lower the lake level in an orderly way over the next couple of weeks.

I'd guess there's still some place to lay out -- back in the weeds maybe but not likely any shoreline in the Cove for a while. If I get by there I'll try to give an update.

Dick W.

I may have been wrong about inflow to the Lake - checking the Corps' page for lake stage and outflow I didn't notice the lake level go up much above what it had been before last week's storms and they don't seem to be releasing much water - maybe none - only 8 CFS cubic feet per second which is "nothing".

Date June 5 2004
Lake Elevation 866.00
Outflow 8 cfs
Air Temperature
Current 64 F
High 80 F
Low 61 F
Water Surface Temperature 71 F


That info is updated daily at:
http://www.nwk.usace.army.mil/cgi-bin/daily.pl?site_name=smithville

Need some "ground truth" - anybody been up there this week for a beach report?