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Two park rangers with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers discussed the importance of the organization’s lakes at last week’s Hot Springs National Park Rotary meeting.
Amy Shultz and Renea Guin, who are both natural resources specialists at Lake Ouachita, have both worked with USACE for more than two decades, and Guin worked at DeGray Lake for 20 years before she was transferred to Lake Ouachita.
Guin said while the organization’s name makes people think all its employees are engineers, there are many different kinds of jobs in the Corps. She said the main purpose for the three lakes the Corps manages in Arkansas is to mitigate flooding.
“We’re not just engineers,” she said. “We are biologists, forestry, budget folks, finance folks. We do a little bit of everything, but our main reason why we built the dams is flood control, because if Ouachita wasn’t there, … Hot Springs would be flooded. Same thing with DeGray, Arkadelphia would be flooded. Flood damage reduction was the number one thing that we, the Corps of Engineers, was doing.”
Lakes Greeson, DeGray and Ouachita are all part of USACE’s Vicksburg District due to them all being part of the Ouachita River basin. Ouachita is the largest of the three lakes and gets approximately 2.5 to 4 million visitors each year while DeGray gets approximately 2 million visitors.
Recreation is a big part of what the rangers do, Shultz said.
“That’s probably what you will see us do the most of out there,” she said. “You’ll see us in the white trucks, or you’ll see us out on the lake. A lot of people think we’re cops, because we do see that, and there is some aspect of that. We have to go by Title 36 Code of Federal Regulations, but we do not generate money from our tickets. It doesn’t come back to us. We’re visitor assistance. We don’t want to spend our time writing citations. That’s not what we like to do out there on the lake. We are there to make sure everybody’s safe.”
Guin said volunteers are key to making sure things run smoothly.
“If we didn’t have volunteers, we wouldn’t be able to do what we do,” she said. “These three lakes, DeGray, Greeson and Ouachita, 2,300 volunteers in 2025, $1.5 million value. It takes volunteers to help us out.”
Shultz agreed, noting many rangers took the voluntary buyouts last year.
“We’re eight rangers short just on Ouachita,” she said. “I don’t have a clue on Greeson or DeGray. We use our volunteers, our campground hosts, to check in and out people, so we can be all hands on deck if we have an accident or something else that goes on on the lake.
“We have hosts in every campground, and then we have maintenance workers in every campground, because our contractors were cut short, too. We didn’t get to hire any temporaries, and we’re under a hiring freeze right now, up until we don’t know when, so we need volunteers.”
Volunteer opportunities are available for adults and kids, Shultz said.
“Any of the lakes take volunteers, and we’d love to have you, even if it’s just for a day,” she said. “If you have kids that need those volunteer hours, we can take them for a day, and they can do something as simple as litter pickup around our shoreline or something as complicated as building the bream beds, building habitat. So, please, if you have students or know of students that need volunteer hours, they can come shadow a ranger for a day, see what we do. Have them call us.”
For more information about Lake Ouachita, visit https://bit.ly/43qjt2W.
