“A Prescription For Healing Woahink Lake”

Register Guard / February 9, 2006 

BY DOUGLAS LARSON

The storm that's brewing at Dunes City on the central Oregon coast is not about the weather, but about controversial plans to build more homes around Woahink Lake (Register-Guard, Jan. 3).

The dispute pits Dunes City residents and oth­ers who favor real-estate development against residents who want to halt development to protect the lake. Everyone involved claims that the lake's preservation is their primary concern.

Whether lake preservation is truly a top prior­ity is questionable. Indeed, two local lake ­protecting ballot measures -- requiring that hundreds of lakeside homes be connected to a sewer line and a sewage treatment plant - - were easily defeated by Dunes City residents, including those living on the lake.

Instead, these homes dispose of their sewage through septic tank and drain field systems, most of which are antiquated, poorly designed and fail to keep raw sewage out of the lake. In 1979, the Lane County Department of Health and Sanita­tion estimated that nearly 50 percent of the septic tanks serving approximately 200 homes around Woahink Lake were failing. Consequently, vari­ous household contaminants - including patho­genic microorganisms, hazardous chemicals, and enough nitrogen and phosphorus to produce al­gae blooms - pour into the lake daily.

Despite the potential health risks, residents obtain their drinking water directly from the lake, apparently believing that the pollution is negligible. Yet some are beginning to sense that the lake is changing.

Last summer, the lake produced a noticeable algae bloom, a phenomenon never before recorded or observed. Residents opposed to more homes are now using this bloom to argue that real-estate development will cause the lake to reach its tipping point, and will begin to deterio­rate rapidly in response to ongoing human en­croachment. Presumably, if development is halt­ed before the tipping point is reached, the lake will remain in a more or less pristine state.

But in fact Woahink and other sand-dunal lakes have already deteriorated due to relentless home-building, road construction, deforestation, recreation and other disturbances over the past 50 years. Since these disturbances tend to be long-lasting, lake deterioration will continue re­gardless of whether more homes, roads, clear-cut forests and recreational opportunities are created.

In addition to household wastes, existing lake­side homes are major sources of pesticides, land­scape fertilizers, automobile pollutants and countless other contaminants. Sediment washed into lakes from construction and logging sites can be removed only by costly, environmentally hazardous dredging projects. Although dredging and other lake-restoration techniques may im­prove lake conditions temporarily, deteriorated conditions generally persist and even worsen in the long run.

Dunes City residents and others cannot claim that they were never warned. In June of 1968, Dr. John Donaldson and I first visited Woahink Lake as part of an Oregon State University project to study and classify the lakes of Oregon. After sev­eral years of limnological investigations, we re­ported in 1974 to the Oregon Department of Envi­ronmental Quality that the coastal lakes, particu­larly Woahink, were not only highly vulnerable to various watershed disturbances, but were showing signs of degradation. We recommended various land-use policies and strategies to protect the lakes and slow their rates of decline.

Additionally, between 1969 and 1998, I inde­pendently photographed the lakes and their wa­tersheds from an aircraft approximately once every four years.  These photos, numbering in the hundreds, illustrate the effects of imprudent and exploitative development in lake watersheds. In 1978, after viewing the photos, the Lane County Board of Commissioners imposed a temporary moratorium on real-estate development between Mercer and Collard lakes north of Florence.

The rush to develop lakeside property and ex­ploit watershed resources, however, continues unabated.

Dunes City officials are now considering a '120-day moratorium on new developments around Woahink Lake. The moratorium, which, could be extended for up to two years, will allow water-quality studies to determine if the lake is near its tipping point. The addition of a hundred or more new homes, all on septic tanks, will un­doubtedly contribute to the lake's decline, per­haps significantly. But proving this will be difficult, if not impossible.

Besides, if new evidence happens to prove lake deterioration, why should it be any more persuasive than previous evidence, all of which was largely ignored?

 

Douglas Larson is a water-quality consultant and adjunct professor in the Department of Envi­ronmental Sciences and Resources at Portland Slate University. He is co-author of a 2005 book, "Ecological Responses to the 1980 Eruption Of Mount St. Helens."

 

Dr. Larson’s article  “ Prescription For Healing Woahink Lake”

Register Guard / February 9, 2006