Corps of Engineers’ Hartwell Lake Project Office Has New Head of Operations

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Hartwell Project Office has a new Project Manager and he is looking to make his office more accessible to the public.

Aaron Wahus came to the Hartwell Project office the end of June.

Wahus comes to Hartwell from the Lake Thurmond project office where he served as the Park Operations Manager there.

With a love of the outdoors, Wahus says his original career choice was to be a forest ranger, but that changed after spending a semester with the Corps of Engineers in Virginia.

He is admittedly still getting his feet wet, but Wahus tells WNEG News he is excited to be the new operations manager for the Hartwell Lake Project.

“I knew I wanted a position like this at some point,” Wahus said. “When Hartwell came open I thought this would be perfect. So I’m excited to be up here and to get started. Plus, the great thing is I’ve known a lot of the (Hartwell) staff for 15 years and a lot of the programs here are similar to what they have at Thurmond. So, it was a pretty easy transition for me.”

But even with the similar programs, Wahus said he would like to make his office more user friendly to the general public. One area towards that goal is to have a Hartwell Project Facebook page.

“We want to run our own Facebook page, our own Instagram,” he explained. “So instead of having a separate one, the new park ranger at Lake Thurmond actually came from West Point and she ran their Facebook page there for years. We convinced Public Affairs to allow her to be the administrator on their (Thurmond) Facebook page and she started to push stuff out from Thurmond. So, in a couple of months, she’s actually going to help us get our stuff out.”

Wahus said he believes the public is not getting the latest news about what is happening at Hartwell Lake and an independent Facebook page will help with that.

Wahus is married with two children. He has served in the Corps of Engineers for the past 23 years.