Helen and the Chattahoochee get two inches of rain

ATLANTA - More than two inches of rain fell at Helen along the Chattahoochee River in northeast Georgia, but it was hard to determine whether the rainfall would have any appreciable effect downstream at Lake Lanier, metro Atlanta's main water supply.

Amounts of precipitation Wednesday night and Thursday varied throughout the drought-stricken river basin. Much of it was soaked into the dry and thirsty ground, and experts already have said Georgia needs months of above-average rainfall to emerge from the drought.

"The rain was spotty. There were places that didn't get very much," said Verona Murrell, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Peachtree City. "Some places got less than a half inch. Some got a quarter inch."

Lake Lanier hit another record low level Thursday, 1052.34 feet above sea level, down almost 19 feet from its full pool of 1071 feet. Until this week, the record low was 1,052.66 feet in December 1981.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is expected to announce by Dec. 7 whether to cut water flows from the reservoir's Buford Dam by another 5 percent. The Corps started reducing the flow by about 5 percent to 3.1 billion gallons a day last week.

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