It’s getting deep

Restoring water quality no easy task

Estimating how much work and money it will take to clean up a problematic, 75-year-old lake is a complex task. You’ve got to wade into it without knowing whether you might get in over your head.

That probably has something to do with the reasons Lake Fayetteville in (spoiler alert) Fayetteville is in its current condition, i.e, not great.

Constructed in 1948 as part of the city’s drinking water supply, the lake’s purpose became rec- reational later after Fayetteville started getting its water supply from Beaver Lake, as it still does today. It is today a scenic setting for surrounding land uses — hiking, biking, picnicking, a botanical garden — and for fishing or boating on the water. Conditions in the water, though, have kept swimming off limits.

The 194-acre lake is a magnet for sediment from a watershed measuring about 9.4 square miles. It also has an abundance of nutrients, which sounds like a positive but becomes just the opposite when a body of water is overloaded. Especially in the summer months, people active on or near the lake have gotten used to the public health warnings arising from blooms of algae in the water: Don’t come into contact with the water. Don’t let pets get into the lake.

The lake remains a public asset, even if water conditions limit activities. City leaders in recent years have pondered whether Lake Fayetteville could be revived to be more than it is, approving a resolution in March 2021 that established improvements in water quality as a goal, perhaps to the point that swimming could one day be allowed.

That’s a grand vision. But is it achievable? The results of a $201,840 study of the lake and its watershed suggest improvements can be made, but its authors say cleaning it up enough to allow swimming “will be extremely challenging” even with the most aggressive (and expensive) strategies to make the lake healthier. The study suggests a goal allowing “secondary contact” — water activities like wading, fishing, sailing, etc., that are less likely to result in immersion — “may be a more attainable goal.”

Short-term strategies to improve the lake’s water quality could be done within five years at a cost of about $6.8 million, if all of them were implemented. With additional maintenance, the 15-year cost for those strategies total an estimated $9.8 million, the study says. More aggressive approaches in the long term, such as hydraulic dredging or excavation of the lake’s floor, could cost more than $17 million over 15 years.

These are massive numbers for an amenity the city hasn’t spent tremendous amounts of money on in decades. Additional challenges involve coordinating the many jurisdictions with control or influence in the lake’s watershed. The larger-scale, longer-term solutions can’t happen only in the lake; they impact surrounding areas that the waters flow through before becoming part of the lake.

The study is done. It provides valuable information, and perhaps a bit of disappointment at the costs and the challenges involved in reviving Lake Fayetteville into the kind of freshwater lake everyone wishes it could be.

Did the study say swimming is an impossible outcome? No, but it sure made the chances of that happening sound remote and expensive.

Are city leaders and Fayetteville residents ready to jump in with both feet, or will they leave Lake Fayetteville as a testament to the dangers of inattention when it comes to water quality?