Saving the lake

Barry Moore has been on the front lines of the Newman Lake’s battle with toxic algae and aquatic weeds for 20 years now. The Washington State University biologist has seen the fish habitat on the lake bottom waste away, and he’s seen it return. He has seen the water drawn from kitchen sinks around the lake smell too bad for consumption because algae fouled the source.

“It’s a hundred times better than it used to be,” Moore said.

He knows, however, that the lake is always on the verge of being a hundred times worse, like five years ago when a faulty oxygen pump sending air into the bottom of the lake malfunctioned and slimy, sometimes toxic, algae rose to the surface. The lake is more like a heart attack patient or a cancer survivor than a kid with a cold. Its future hinges heavily on lifestyle changes and constant care.

Newman Lake’s health depends on sending oxygen to its lowest depths, where as surface water heats up during summer months, cool water becomes trapped. Untreated, that cold water, unable to rise to the surface and be exposed to air, becomes dangerously low on oxygen. Aquatic plants consume whatever oxygen is left in the water, and soon the lake bottom becomes unlivable for fish.

The oxygen, delivered by a propeller on the end of a long breathing pipe extending from the surface to the lake bottom, addresses only part of the problem by giving fish and aquatic plants what they need to survive. The other part of the problem, the nutrients building up on the bottom of the lake, is dealt with through alum injection.

Slimy blue-green algae begin to take over the lake bottom, feeding on a lake bed blanketed with phosphorous and other nutrients. Eventually, the algae comes to the surface, becoming a problem lakewide. Blue-green algae can double in size every 20 minutes under the right conditions.

“They cause taste and odor problems,” Moore said. “It’s a different, foul tasting odor. Some blooms are actually toxic and have resulted in pet deaths and human death. That hasn’t happened in Newman Lake, but it happened in Long Lake in the 1970s.”

Nutrients, including phosphorous, on the bottom of the lake are the Miracle-Gro of the blue-green algae world. And nutrients exist naturally on lake bottoms where algae and good aquatic plants decompose. They also flow into the lake from myriad other sources.

Lawn fertilizer and home sewage can contribute to lake nutrient problems, but Moore said the biggest nonlake contributor to the nutrient problem at this time is sediment washed into the lake by area streams.

In recent years, a strong community effort had been under way to limit the nutrients being flushed into Newman Lake from area streams. Off road vehicles have been tightly restricted, as well as mountain biking and even hiking. In the Thompson Creek drainage, Newman Lake’s main tributary, a guard monitors a local access road all summer. The land he watches is mostly timberland owned by Inland Empire Paper. The paper company restricts most travel through the area because the less the soil is disturbed, the fewer nutrients will make it to the lake.

Alum injection tones down the nutrients in the lake by trapping them on the lake bottom. Once trapped, the nutrients aren’t available as food to blue-green algae. On average, about 400,000 pounds of alum have been injected into Newman Lake every year since the injection process first started in 1997, Moore said in a water quality report issued this spring. And that alum amount is down considerably from 1989 when the entire lake was treated with 1.8 million pounds.

Ideally, at some point Newman Lake will not need alum injections any longer, Moore said, but there’s no foreseeable date when treatments will stop.

On dry ground, much needs to be done before lake treatments end, say those trying to turn the lake around.

Margo Wolf, a lake resident involved with collecting nutrient samples from area streams, said there’s now talk of abandoning some of the roads in local drainages that threaten the lake with nutrient runoffs. And the number of off-road vehicles buzzing through the forests has decreased considerably since the paper company started guarding its property.

“I’m so thrilled that we’re not seeing the amount of ORVs we used to see,” Wolf said. “Inland Empire Paper is right now doing a road management and abandonment plan,” Wolf said. “It will allow a watershed tour this fall.” (The paper company is a subsidiary of Cowles Publishing Co., which also owns The Spokesman-Review.)

Other dry land problems facing the lake include shoreline landscaping, which goes mostly unregulated. Properties along the lake where natural willows and snowberry bushes filtered land pollutants have now been replaced by manicured lawns extending all the way to the shoreline. And just into the water, property owners have cleared aquatic plants from lake shallows to make them more enjoyable for swimming, which disturbs nutrients and can promote water weed infestation. The lake is currently battling a milfoil outbreak. Any broken milfoil plant can lead to scores more.

Lawns don’t filter pollutants as well as the native plants and also add pollution in the form of fertilizer, said Marianne Barrentine, Spokane County’s Newman Lake engineer. She describes the problem as a battle between what’s good for the lake and what people perceive as the classic lake life.

“A lot of it is just people’s perception. Their idea of perfect is a lawn down to a nice, sandy beach, but there’s supposed to be no removal of vegetation within a 50 foot buffer of the shoreline.”

Enforcement becomes harder still when there are examples of old, private lawns rolling all the way to the shore line. Properties that had lawns in before shoreline regulations were created are exempt from rules forbidding imported sand and lawns. Also accepted as part of lake culture are outhouses. The community Web site, www.newmanlake.com, advises lake residents to keep theirs functional should their water pumps ever go out.

Policing land-use detrimental to the lake is done primarily by comparing the new shore activity to photos of what the lake looked like a year before. Barrentine said she looks for changes whenever she’s on the water, but admittedly much goes unseen.

The way Wolf puts it, saving the lake has always been tackled on a landowner-by-landowner basis. A lot of work remains undone.