What Really Happens on Plug Day

Midnight on March 1 is the day on which Martin Dam’s operators begin to raise the lake level to summer pool. Though this date is affectionately known as ‘Plug Day’ and is celebrated with much ado at Lake Martin, there is not an actual plug that facilitates the 7-foot fill of Lake Martin each spring. The rise to the 491-foot mark is instead a balancing act between inflows and outflows, said Alabama Power Company’s Tallapoosa River Manager Chris Goodman.

“We monitor the inflows coming into the lake, and we monitor the outflows through generation, so we are sending out less water than what is coming in,” Goodman explained. “This year, for instance, we’re getting a lot of rain. If that continues, we won’t have to curtail generation very much, but the water level will stay up. If the rain starts to slow down, and the lake isn’t rising toward the summer level, we would curtail generation, even to the point of stopping generation, to bring the level up.”