Thursday March 28th, 2024 5:28PM

DNR official: Safety of Lake Lanier comes down to individuals

By Austin Eller News Director

Nearly every boating season, at least one fatal incident or drowning occurs on Lake Lanier. However, is the lake more dangerous than other lakes in the state?

Mark McKinnon, communications manager with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources Law Enforcement Division said that while unfortunate incidents inevitably occur every year, he believes the lake itself is not dangerous.

“Water is only as dangerous as the people who are using it,” McKinnon said. “Any body of water can be dangerous if you don’t take the proper safety precautions. That’s just the bottom line.”

McKinnon said some lakes could be considered more dangerous due to “challenges” in the water.

“If you were to go to extreme South Georgia and go to Lake Seminole, there is a very small channel in that lake and outside that channel are lots of stumps and things that are sticking out of the water,” McKinnon said.

While McKinnon does believe Lake Lanier has one major challenge, it has nothing to do with the body of water.

“[It is] one of the most visited lakes in the nation, and so people wonder why Lake Lanier has all these drownings and boating incidents,” McKinnon said. “A lot of it just has to do with the sheer number of people that are there.”

According to statistics provided by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, approximately 12,800,000 people visited Lake Lanier in 2020. Meanwhile, about 9,180,000 people visited Lake Hartwell, and 6,420,000 people visited Lake Allatoona in 2020.

When it comes to drownings on those three lakes in 2020, Lanier had seven, Hartwell had one and Allatoona had three. However, McKinnon said that it is hard to look at the safety of a lake using statistics due to factors that change annually.

“You have to look at the weather patterns too,” McKinnon said. “What if it rained more than half of the weekends of the summer? There are so many factors that play into it. If it’s unusually cool in the late spring or early fall.”

Regardless of how the public feels about the safety of Lake Lanier, McKinnon said wearing a life jacket is one thing any person on the lake should do to take safety into their own hands.

“I’ve been at DNR since about the middle of 2014, and I can only recall one drowning in the entire state where someone had a life jacket on, and that was a very unusual circumstance in a river,” McKinnon said.

Scott Barnes, a Lake Lanier angler and boater who runs a fishing tournament trail for Hammond’s and USA Mortgage, said he occasionally sees people on the lake who are not being safe.

“There are several cruisers that are out there and weekend people that are out there enjoying the lake that seem to be a little clueless, but not all of them,” Barnes said. “We’ve seen them run up on shallow markers and humps and destroy their boat and get hurt.”

Like McKinnon, Barnes believes that the lake's safety comes down to those on the lake and their safety precautions, not the lake itself.

“Make certain you have your life vest on, then make certain that the boat is operating properly from a standpoint that it’s cranking, batteries charged, your bilge pumps work,” Barnes said.

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