Effluent Lifestyle Tests Indicated Brown Water Pumped Into Black Lake Met State Quality Standards

FROM FOR THE RECORD (Saturday, October 4, 1997): Correction Water quality OK: Water pumped off pastures of the Morrow Ranch into Black Lake met state water quality standards. A Thursday headline may have suggested otherwise.

Dave Nelson wears a black hat, but he doesn’t like anyone calling him a bad guy.

Especially behind his back.

“That ticked me off,” he said, recalling how his neighbors, mostly summer-home residents, griped to environmental officials that the Morrow Ranch was pumping brown water off pastures into Black Lake.

“There wasn’t one of them that came to me and asked me anything about it,” said Nelson, ranch manager.

Nelson has cooled down. He feels vindicated by what those environmental people found when they sampled the water.

And Black Lake’s vacation-home dwellers are taking a bigger-picture look at water quality. There’s even talk of working on a watershed plan to protect the lake.

“Those of us that cursed the pumping have a better understanding of his position,” neighbor Tom Bell said of Nelson. “He expressed some sentiment for working on alternatives.”

Bell’s Moscow, Idaho, family has had a vacation home for 20-plus years in what he calls this “wonderful playground.” Quiet, remote Black Lake is one of nine small lakes that lie along the lower Coeur d’Alene River.

The Morrow Ranch pastures are separated by levees from the lake and river. Summer residents aren’t normally around to see the annual pumping of spring runoff into the lake.

This year was different.

Dramatic May flooding resulted in a washed-out railroad levee. That left 3 to 4 feet of water on 650 of the ranch’s 2,800 acres.

“I have to get it off as fast as I can, because it kills my grass. I was pumping solid from the time it flooded,” said Nelson. “It was the middle of August before I finally shut it off.”

Nelson calls the water “golden,” noting that it is clear, not cloudy with sediment. Still, the sight of it gushing from three 16-inch pipes into the lake was too much for some vacationers.

At the time, Black Lake was more than living up to its name.

“We wouldn’t even swim in the lake this year,” said Cheryl Plett, whose family bought a vacation home four years ago. “The boat is just black on the bottom, it’s just disgusting. Instead of a white wake, it was brown.”

The Idaho Division of Environmental Quality tested the water that was being pumped and found it met water quality standards. The lake was technically “swimmable” and not much different from when it was tested in 1992, said DEQ’s Geoff Harvey.

The water did contain some phosphorus from nutrients that can come from cow manure and pollute a lake. But it was the chemistry of decomposing plants that caused the discoloration.

“This is ugly water,” Harvey said. “Because it sits in the field and stews and brews, it has a lot of tannic acid in it, which is very brown.”

Tannins are probably what gives Black Lake its name, he added.

Mike Schlepp, a rancher who lives upstream, said much of the concern came from a lack of understanding.

“People mean well, but they don’t realize how wetlands function. As an example, the Ducks Unlimited wetland at Rose Lake naturally discharges water as discolored, and it has as much if not more nutrients than the Black Lake water.”

Harvey got so many complaints about the pumping that he called a public meeting to clear the air. On Aug. 25, more than 20 people showed up at the Medimont Grange.

Among them were Bell and his wife, Jody.

“The bottom line as I understood it is the discharge into the lake meets state regulations,” Bell said. “One could say something about state standards, but that’s another issue.”

The meeting was a good starting point for improving Black Lake, said Bell, a retired University of Idaho provost.

He and a handful of other property owners will form a volunteer corps to monitor water quality. They’ve also asked for help from the federal Natural Resources Conservation Service to help write a watershed management plan.

Dave Brown, district conservationist, said he’d be glad to help. He described the ranch’s contribution to water problems as “more noticeable, not more important” than other causes of pollution.

Nelson offered to take part in efforts to protect the lake, which he said “could definitely be in better shape.” He blames outdated septic systems at the summer homes for part of the problem.

Normally, the Morrow Ranch provides pasture for 800 cow/calf pairs whose owners pay to graze them there. This year, because of the flooded land, that number was reduced to 100, said Nelson. The ranch put up no hay this year, instead of its usual 300 to 400 tons.

“We lost probably $60,000 to $70,000 worth of income this year,” he said.

Pumping cost $12,000, compared to $5,000 in a normal year.

Those losses compounded problems from the previous years’ floods. In 1996, high water did even more damage to the levees but came in late winter, when it was easier to drain off the fields.

Nelson and owner William Morrow are considering some long-term options for the flood-prone land.

One option is selling wetlands easements to the federal government. That would mean no grazing or farming in return for letting nature have its wet way with the land.

Meanwhile, Nelson intends to fix the levee himself. He plans to start shoving dirt around in November, when the water’s down.

Before long it will be spring, time for Nelson’s ritual of looking down nervously at the levees from his hillside house.

“Every year I wonder, when’s the water going to come over the top?”

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