CENTRE — Few discussions of the current sewage problems in Weiss Lake get very involved before someone accuses the company that built the lake in the early 1960s of being a major source of the problem.

“Alabama Power is a joke,” read a letter to the editor in the Feb. 21 issue of The Post urging action to clean the lake. “Their only interest is in making money from power generation and charging honest folks high fees for dock permits.”

It's easy to argue that decades of inattention helped lead to the present problem of unapproved construction in Alabama Power's (APCo) easement around Weiss Lake. In fact, the man who heads the company's shoreline management office hinted at as much last week.

“I think that, at the time, Alabama Power believed people would buy their lakefront property, read their deed and do what they were supposed to do,” Regional Coordinator Tommy Miller told The Post.

When the lake first opened for business in June 1961, Miller said, folks who lived around the 30,200-acre reservoir generally followed the law and did what was expected of them.

“Going back to when Alabama Power acquired the property, we incorporated information in all the deeds about what the flood easement covered, which was our ability to have a dominant easement to flood this property,” he said. “We also laid out that there would be no habitable structures, no structures for housing livestock, no disturbance of the land, etc.”

Somewhere along the way, however, Alabama Power apparently realized that lot owners were forgetting the particulars of the legal documents they signed when they paid for their property inside the easement.

By the late 1970s, the company felt compelled to ask for special permission from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to license and regulate structures inside the easement. FERC gave the company that authority in 1981.

Almost 20 years later, according to a survey compiled by the East Alabama Planning Commission in 1999, there were still as many as 12,000 temporary vehicles – all with very little access to proper sewage facilities – sitting inside Alabama Power's flood easement.

But Miller was quick to make clear the distinction between a possible sewage violation and Alabama Power's concern over a structure that might impede rising water during a flood event.

“From our standpoint, we believe there are only around 3,000 questionable sites [in the easement] and that about 1,000 of those are permanent, non-permitted structures,” Miller said. “The others are either compliant or semi-compliant.”

Miller said in his five years of managing the shoreline office in Centre, he has seen only a handful of cases that required legal action.

“It is my understanding that the 12,000 number is the total number of vehicles, not permanent structures,” Miller said. “A lot of that is transient, summertime stuff. As long as they can move it out, it is fine with us.”

A recent check of documents in the Cherokee County Courthouse revealed a total of only eight easement-related lawsuits filed by APCo since 2007 which ended up in front of a judge.

“In that same amount of time, we have probably settled with somewhere between 300 and 500 owners who have brought their property into compliance, or are in the process of doing so,” Miller said.

An APCo spokesman said the last five years of scrutiny are an example of what shareholders around Weiss Lake can expect from the company from now on.

"Since we opened the shoreline management office in 2006, we have been very proactive in enforcing our rights within the easement," Communications Specialist Brandon Glover said. "We are going to remedy any issues that may have existed prior to our office opening and we will be diligent going forward."

Miller admits the concern expressed by Probate Judge Melvyn Salter and others who worry about how thousands of temporary vehicles may be disposing of their sewage is a valid one. In fact, Miller said he's seen plenty of violations during his many drives around the lake over the past five years.

“When we see something we do the only thing we can, which is report the problem to the Cherokee County Health Department,” Miller said. “That's all we can do. We have no legal remedy to solve the sewage problem.”

Glover waived off accusations that the company has been slow to react to locals' concerns about unapproved construction in the flood easement as possible sources of raw sewage entering Weiss Lake through the years.

“I think as soon as we realized we needed to make a concerted effort, we did that,” he said. “And we will continue to do that moving forward. We want to help the County Commission and the Health Department with this problem, even though it's not part of our license or within our ability to enforce.”

“We will support them any way we can,” Miller added. “If they need photographs or anything else we can provide as we make our rounds, we have always been happy to do that.”