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	Podcast:		Local Features by WXPR
	Episode:		During Massive October Drawdown, Divide Over Dam Operation On Display
	Category:		Government & Organizations
	Duration:		00:05:22
	Publish Date:		2019-10-24 05:21:54
	Description:		Alyssa Ullrich and her husband love life on the water. “We have the two docks. Our ski boat goes on this lift, and then we’ve got a fishing boat that goes over on that lift,” she said, standing on her dock on a channel of the Manitowish Chain in Vilas County. Her nine-month-old boy, Baxter, squirmed in her arms. For weeks, Ullrich has watched the water level on the ten-lake Manitowish Chain, including her channel between Rest and Stone lakes, go down. It does every year to protect permanent docks, lifts, and seawalls like hers from ice damage in the winter. “Our two piers that we have and our boat lifts would be just destroyed in the wintertime [without the drawdown,” Ullrich said. “The water would freeze around them, and then the ice expands. It would just bend the poles on the pier.” The total drawdown is about three and a half feet of lake level. All of it drains through one point, the Rest Lake Dam, and it all drains during the month of October. It’s happened that way, more or less
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