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CENTRE — Savannah, Ga. native Carolyn Landrem has been wetting hooks for as long as she can remember. Twenty years ago, she and her husband were fishing their way around the Southeast when they stumbled across Weiss Lake.

“We liked it here, so we said 'let's move here',” she said. “And we did.”

Around a decade later, Landrem found a way to convert her love for fishing – and Cherokee County – into volunteer work when she got involved with the Weiss Lake Improvement Association (WLIA).

Landrem has seen a lot of water pass under the bridge since then. Unfortunately, she figures most of it was dirtier than it should have been. Last year, a frustrated Landrem even stood up in a public meeting and declared that her grandkids do not swim in the 30,200-acre reservoir.

Around that same time, the Alabama Attorney General ordered the County Commission and Health Department to end years of finger pointing and inaction and start working together to enforce a law passed in 2001 specifically for the purpose of stopping the largely unchecked practice of dumped raw sewage into Weiss.

This publication has reported on the crisis several times since 2006. Last year, Probate Judge Melvyn Salter told The Post he estimated as many as 12,000 campers and travel trailers around the lake still do not properly handle their sewage.

All those years of inaction finally added up to more than the WLIA could stand. Last summer, Landrem and her peers began working on a plan to test water from around the lake to determine how bad the sewage problem really is.

“In all the studies that have been done on Weiss Lake, it was always mentioned that untreated sewage was being dumped and that the issue needed to be addressed,” she said. “We started investigating and discovered there was really no data to either prove or disprove that information.”

WLIA researchers also soon discovered that no state procedure existed for testing for E-Coli or other bacteria in a body of water the size of Weiss.

Landrem consulted with the Rome, Ga.-based Coosa River Basin Initiative on what type of testing equipment to buy.

“The unit cost around $7,000,” she said. “And we are conducting two tests per month at each of 25 sites around the lake. We start at the Georgia line, test at the mouths of all the creeks and rivers, and in the river channel itself.”

Landrem said the monthly cost of $300 for the tests does not include gasoline for the boat or the hours it takes to make the two-day trip back and forth across Weiss Lake. (Most of the WLIA's money for the testing comes from grants, membership dues and donations from local businesses.)

Next, since nothing of the sort already existed the WLIA had to write its own testing manual.

“We worked with ADEM, Georgia EPD and the equipment company and wrote a testing protocol,” Landrem said. “We wrote up this whole thing, because we want to be able to compare these numbers from winter testing, when the water is cooler and we don't have a lot of people staying around the lake,” she said.

Landrem said “money and lack of personnel” were the most common reasons she got from organizations such as the Alabama Department of Environmental Management and the Health Department when she asked why no one had ever conducting such a study before.

“There's never been, that we have been able to find, the type of study we are doing at Weiss Lake,” she said. “That's why we had to create our protocol for testing – it did not exist.”

Landrem said she and her peers at WLIA have a strong suspicion of what they will find after they conduct a follow-up round of tests in late spring or early summer, after the weather warms up and the campgrounds start to fill up.

“It is our suspicion that there are multiple campgrounds around Weiss Lake that are not treating their sewage properly and causing this problem,” she said. “We either want to prove that outright, or disprove it.”

Landrem said county, state and federal agencies will be notified when and if the test results rise above federally-mandated “safe” levels.

“If that happens, we will be notifying all the proper authorities,” Landrem said. “We'll ask them to do their own tests, to verify our readings, and then take the appropriate action.”

Landrem said she does worry about the potential impact on tourism that publicizing the results of water tests – or even the existence of them – could have. But ultimately, Landrem said, she prefers that both she and the WLIA be remembered for doing something, not nothing.

“This information is going to allow the county and other agencies to put together a strategic plan to clean up our lake and make it better for everyone in the future,” Landrem said. “The alternative is to stand by and let the lake continue to deteriorate.”