Lake Hartwell as it touches Seminole Point: who to call at the Corps before you change the shoreline, where the level is heading, how the shoreline has looked over the years, and what is in the news.
This page pulls from the U.S. Geological Survey, the Army Corps of Engineers and NOAA, runs its own forecast once a day, and draws the lake from published survey and chart data. Here is what each tab uses.
Read from USGS gauges every 15 minutes, their own reporting interval, and saved so pages read our copy rather than asking USGS on every visit. Level: USGS gauge 02187010 on Lake Hartwell. Hartwell has no continuous temperature gauge, so water temperature is the nearest one, on Lake Russell above Calhoun Falls, used as a stand-in.
USGS 02187010 · USGS 02188100
Once a day, between 9 AM and 2 PM, the site runs its own forecast. It gathers the Corps’ hourly records of lake level, inflow and releases; reads the Corps’ daily report and 10-week projection (PDFs, read automatically); takes NOAA’s 30-day inflow forecast for Hartwell (four runs); and adds USGS flows on the Chattooga, Tallulah and Twelvemile Creek. SemPt Model Beta, fitted to Hartwell’s history, turns that into a 30-day outlook with a range, shown beside the Corps’ own projection. Every run is archived.
USACE CWMS · Corps Savannah District reports · NOAA National Water Model · USGS
USGS mapping for the lake, rivers and watersheds. Near Seminole Point, 660 ft is traced from 2019 USGS lidar and 630 ft from the i-Boating chart (depths from about 648 ft), with the lines between drawn smoothly. Photos: Esri / Vantor at full pool, April 2025; the bare bank, Maxar, March 2017 at 649.9 ft.
USGS National Hydrography Dataset · USGS lidar · i-Boating chart · USACE · Esri · USDA NAIP
Google Earth’s historical photos of the same stretch of lake, 1985 to 2025. No aerial photo exists from the 2008 drought, so those dates are NASA/USGS Landsat 5 satellite pictures. Each is labelled with that day’s lake level from the USGS gauge’s daily average and Corps records.
Imagery © Google · Landsat 5 via Microsoft Planetary Computer · USGS · USACE
The Corps’ own ramps come from its Recreation Operational Status page, which the Corps updates daily; this site reads it four times a day and keeps the date each status began. County, city, state park and marina ramps publish no status anywhere, so they appear only as closures reported by a named source, entered by the site administrator.
USACE Recreation Operational Status · named outlets
Marinas with fuel, restaurants you can reach by boat, and public tie-up docks. Each place is checked by hand against its own website or a named source, and the date it was checked is shown; where a business does not say on its site that boaters can tie up, that comes from local knowledge and the map says so. Ramps on the map are the same ones, with the same status, as the Boat Ramps tab.
Business websites · named sources · map © OpenStreetMap contributors
Shoreline permit contacts for Seminole Point’s area, copied from the Corps’ Savannah District shoreline management page. They are kept by hand, and an automated check compares them with the Corps’ page every week.
USACE Savannah District
An automated scan runs each afternoon, reads new Lake Hartwell articles at their source and summarizes them in our own words; each is published only once the site administrator approves it. Corps releases are fetched from its site; “Now vs. 2008” and “What Fills Our Lake” were written for this site.
USACE · linked news outlets · SC DNR