Who controls the level of Winona Lake

The level of Winona Lake is set at its outlet. Water leaves through Eagle Creek, and the flow passes a control structure that the Indiana DNR has surveyed, described, and set brass benchmarks into. The DNR's 2005 fish management report for the lake records the water level control in five words: "Concrete dam with 2, 3x4 adjustable gates."

The structure at the outlet

The most detailed public description of the dam sits in a surveyor's document: the DNR Division of Water's Control Station Descriptions and Elevations for Kosciusko County, which exists so engineers can tie their own work to known elevations. Three of its entries describe this structure.

• DNR BM WINONA 1, 1977 is a brass control station tablet stamped "WINONA 1 1977", set in the top of the northwest concrete abutment of the control structure for Winona Lake, about 200 feet upstream of the Packerton Road bridge over Eagle Creek, roughly a mile south of Warsaw. The description places it 6.6 feet west of the staff gage. Its elevation is 813.521 feet on the NGVD 1929 datum.
• DNR TBM WCS 1, 2004 is a chiseled square in the northeast abutment of the same structure, described as 3.81 feet above the concrete crest of the spillway and 0.35 feet above the wood board of the staff gage. Its elevation is 813.49 feet NGVD 1929.
• USGS reference marks 3, 6, and 7 are older gaging station marks at the same dam. Reference mark 3 is set in the top of a concrete lake level monument, 12.5 feet northeast of the north end of the dam. Reference marks 6 and 7 sit in the wingwalls, each described relative to a south staff gage.

Read together, those entries describe a working piece of water infrastructure: a spillway with a concrete crest, two adjustable gates, a staff gage for reading the pool, a lake level monument, and enough survey control to settle an argument about elevation to a hundredth of a foot.

The number the DNR recorded

The lake pages appended to the 2005 fish management report give the operational summary. Water level: 811 feet. Extreme fluctuations: none. Location of benchmark: northwest corner of the lake, adjacent to the control dam. Outlet: Eagle Creek. Inlets: Peterson Ditch at the south end, Wyland Ditch at the southeast corner originating at Tennant Lake, and Keefer-Evans Ditch at the south end.

"Extreme fluctuations: none" is the line that matters to anyone with a pier. A gated outlet on a lake that holds roughly a year of water does not swing the way a river impoundment does, which is why pier and lift rules here are written around depth and navigation rather than around a seasonal drawdown.

Why published elevations differ by about four tenths of a foot

Anyone comparing two elevation figures for this lake will eventually hit a discrepancy of roughly 0.4 feet, and it is not an error. Vertical elevations in the United States have been published on two different datums: the older National Geodetic Vertical Datum of 1929 and the newer North American Vertical Datum of 1988. The same physical point has a different number on each.

How much water, and how long it stays

Volume and outflow together set how long water stays in the lake. The DNR sheet puts the lake's volume at 16,860 acre-feet. The EPA's 1976 National Eutrophication Survey working paper on Winona Lake gives a volume of 20.657 million cubic meters, a mean Eagle Creek outflow of 0.75 cubic meters per second, and a mean hydraulic retention time of 319 days.

Those numbers agree with each other. The EPA volume converts to about 16,750 acre-feet, within one percent of the DNR figure recorded three decades later, and 0.75 cubic meters per second is about 26.5 cubic feet per second, or roughly 53 acre-feet a day. Dividing the volume by that outflow returns 319 days, which is the retention time the EPA published.

A little under a year of residence has consequences that show up all over this site. It is why a nutrient load delivered by the inlets in spring is still in the system in autumn, why the stratification cycle is so well developed here, and why what arrives down Peterson Ditch matters more than it would on a fast-flushing lake.

The gauge that used to be here

The USGS once published this lake's level as a continuous record. Monitoring location USGS 03331140, "Winona Lake at Warsaw, IN", is classified as a lake, reservoir, or impoundment site in Kosciusko County, with daily data from August 4, 1943 through September 29, 2002 and field measurements from September 1988 to October 2002. The USGS lists the site altitude as 800.1 feet on the NGVD 1929 datum, which is a site reference rather than a reading of the lake surface.

Nearly sixty years of daily lake level for Winona Lake sits in that archive, ending in 2002. Nothing has replaced it. The county maintains lake level data for Kosciusko County, and that office is the place to start for current records.

What the law says about lake levels

Indiana has a statute for exactly this situation. IC 14-26-8, "Lakes; Changes in Levels," provides at section 3 for petitions to build or maintain a control dam or similar structure to hold a lake at a set level. That section requires a level to be stated by reference to sea level datum where it is ascertainable, or otherwise to a lawfully established staff gauge installed in the lake. The chapter further requires that any established elevation be certified and recorded with the county recorder in every county the lake lies in. Elevations must refer to United States Coast and Geodetic Survey levels or USGS third order levels.

That is why the staff gage next to the benchmark matters. Under this statute a staff gauge can be the legal reference the level is defined against, which is why the one beside the benchmark matters.

What this article could not establish

Three questions stayed open, and they are the ones a lakefront owner would most want answered.

• Whether Winona Lake has a legal established level under IC 14-26-8. No recorded elevation for this lake was located in public sources. If one exists it would be on file with the Kosciusko County Recorder and known to the county surveyor.
• Who operates the gates. The structure is described in state survey records and appears in county documents, and no source located for this article names the entity responsible for adjusting it or the schedule it follows.
• The current pool elevation. The 811-foot figure comes from a DNR survey sheet, and the continuous record ended in 2002.

The Kosciusko County Surveyor's office and the DNR Division of Water are the two offices that would hold those answers, and this article will be updated when they are confirmed.

Where to watch the water now

Flow is published live even though level is not. The public stream monitor on Xylem's HydroSphere platform carries an Eagle Creek station along with the inlet ditches, reporting flow, velocity, and depth. After a storm, that outlet station is the closest thing to a live answer about how much water the lake is shedding, and the heavy rain article covers what to expect from it. Current conditions on the lake itself are on Lake Today.