Chattahoochee at Columbus down to 38% of normal, Upatoi Creek at 78%
Why is the Chattahoochee River so low right now in Columbus?
The Chattahoochee at Columbus was running about 1,040 cubic feet per second Wednesday morning, roughly 38 percent of the normal 2,730 for the date, because late-summer baseflow is at its yearly low and the river here is regulated by dams at West Point, Lake Harding and Lake Eufaula.
Photo: Free Nature Stock / Pexels
Walk out on the RiverWalk at 14th Street early, with Phenix City still quiet on the far bank, and the Chattahoochee looks about the way it always looks. The numbers say otherwise. At 8:45 Wednesday morning the gauge there read 16.53 feet and 1,040 cubic feet of water per second going by. The normal for this date, the middle of everything that gauge has recorded since 1930, is 2,730. That is 38 percent of normal — much below normal for the date.
Here is the part worth repeating at supper: Columbus has had a wet year. Since the first of January the airport has measured a little over 40 inches of rain, close to four inches ahead of where it usually is by late September. A river does not care much about January. It answers to the last few weeks, and to the season.
Late summer is when a river is at its thinnest even in a good year. The trees are still drinking hard, the ground is still warm enough to give water back to the air, and a lot of what falls soaks in before it ever reaches a creek. Between rains, what keeps a river moving is baseflow — groundwater seeping in through the banks and the bed — and baseflow is near its yearly low right now. On top of that, this stretch of the Chattahoochee is really a chain of reservoirs: West Point Lake above LaGrange, Lake Harding on the state line, Lake Eufaula further down. What passes any one gauge depends partly on what the dams upstream are letting through that morning.
Upstream at West Point, the gauge stood at 2.25 feet with 798 cubic feet per second, against a normal of 2,900 for the date — 28 percent, and below normal in that gauge's record going back to 1974. Down below Lake Eufaula, near Columbia, Alabama, the river was running 1,200 against a normal of 4,350. That is 28 percent as well, and much below normal there.
The one that is holding up best is the one nobody built a dam on. Upatoi Creek near Columbus, the stream that comes in from the east past Oxbow Meadows, was at 3.81 feet and 114 cubic feet per second Wednesday morning, against a normal of 147 — 78 percent. Still below normal, but closer to it than anything on the main river.
One caution before anyone reads too much into it at the dock: these are river gauges, not lake levels. What the Corps is holding behind West Point or at Walter F. George is a separate question from what is sliding past Columbus at breakfast time.
If you want to know when the ground here has finally had enough to drink, watch Upatoi. An undammed creek answers only to rain and to the dirt it drains, and it will jump days before the big river shows much of anything.
Written by the CNAW 2 weather desk from CNAW 2 weather desk data. Last updated September 23, 2026 at 10:33 AM Eastern. Covering Columbus and Phenix City, Auburn–Opelika, LaGrange, Eufaula and the rest of the 19-county CNAW viewing area.
