Evaporation impacting lake water level, too

After reading the recent article in the Pilot about lake levels (Water Woes, Sept. 9) I feel one clarification is needed about municipal and irrigation pumping being a factor on the lake level.

It would be my guess that evaporation is as much or more of a factor on the lake level than pumping when you realize that just one inch of the lake level is about 90 million gallons of water.

We could have pumped all our water from the lake in August and not drawn the lake down a full inch, even if we assumed that no water entered the lake from the tributaries and subsurface sources during that time.

— Greg Acton is utility operations supervisor for the city of Whitefish