Does it still matter?

 

A friend saw this article from the Star Tribune and sent me this picture from that short piece.The picture looks like it could have come from our old backyard. This isn't even close to the first time this issue has come up. One of the many motivations we had for selling that house was the constant abuse and disregard the city and state demonstrated for that small, historic lake; reclassified as a "watershed" to make the abuse "legal." MNDOT trashed the lake, first with total disrespect in the 1970s by "bridging the lake" with thousands of tons of dirt dumped on the frozen lake to be used for the freeway construction in the spring. That caused flooding in the lower houses on the east side of the new freeway, buried a good bit of the underground water supply for the lake, poured pollution into the lake, and quickly demonstrated the traditional European invaders' disrespect for anything held sacred by Native Americans. Just that act makes a feeble attempt to rename the lake for political correctness another addition of insult to the injury. 

While we lived on Lakeshore Drive, from 1997 to 2015, we saw countless demonstrations of how little the state of Minnesota and the city of Little Canada cared about that once-beautiful little lake. When we first moved into our home, which had been owned by a goober who used the backyard as a practice course for drunken Bobcat parties and who regularly plowed refuse from his "landscaping company" down the hill into the lake, there was still some life in the lake. My grandson and I built a small deck from our yard, out of fallen trees the previous owner had littered all over the shoreline, and we'd watch catfish, perch, and other small fish bob for pieces of bread he'd toss into the water. 

The city actually, illegally, hired a UofM prof and a pack of nitwits to poach Canadian Geese from the lake for several years before residents (loudly led by Ms. Day) embarrassed them into stopping that practice.

That first summer, the local high school maintenance department dumped a few hundred gallons of toxic chemicals into the school's drainage ditch, which made its way to the lake and killed hundreds of fish. Of course, neither the DNR, the Ramsey County Watershed District, or the state's EPA bothered to even reprimand the school's employees and no thought whatsoever was given to repairing that damage. From then until we left, the only fish we ever saw in the lake were minnows and few of them.  At least one business on the north side of our portion (west) of the lake regularly dumped manufacturing chemicals into a drain that kept that end of the lake coated with petroleum rainbows. 

In 2008, the Watershed District  engineers "designed" a new drainage system that, accidentally, lowered the lake level by at least two feet. As a demonstration of how "complicated" determining where that drain level should have been set, my 9-year-old grandson designed an experiment that we documented for his grade school using string, a level, and a tape measure.

MNDOT "designed" various freeway drainage systems that filled the lake with sand, salt, and roadway contaminates peaking (during our time there) with the 2010's expansion of the freeway and a drainage ditch from the south-going Little Canada Road freeway entrance that immediately filled the meager remains of the spring and turned the lake from a feeble remainder of a lake (that once had a "deep end" that exceeded 8') into a rapidly filling swamp with no spot on the lake that couldn't be walked across. Of course, the slackers who get paid way too much to prevent this kind of thing at the state's EPA, the DNR, and the totally worthless Watershed District bureaucrats were busy cleaning their fingernails or counting the money that appeared on their desks in unmarked brown paper bags as that all happened. (After 18 years trying to defend our backyard lake from all of those worthless deadbeats, I have no respect for any of those departments or their employees.)

 For us, the final insult-to-injury nail-in-the-coffin that convinced us to sell our beloved home was the pointless, overpriced, dysfunctional "noise wall" that served to prevent freeway traffic from seeing the eyesore our lake had become. There is no acoustical justification, even based on MNDOT's own guidelines, for a 15' wooden wall placed hundreds of feet from the nearest property it is intended to "protect." COVID did a far more effective job of lowering the health-endangering noise levels (averaging 91dBA in our backyard during the summer and fall of 2014) from I35E in our neighborhood by reducing traffic massively for 2 years. However, as the wall was being constructed MNDOT got serious about directing freeway contaminants into the lake and the south end of the west side of the lake rapidly filled in and became so overrun with sand, salt, and silt that one of our neighbor's dock was literally lifted out of the water. Waterlilies flourished as the lake level dropped.

One of the reasons we ended up staying in Minnesota for the past 28 years was my wife's dream of living on a lake came true when we found our Lakeshore Avenue home in early 1997 just before my promised transfer back to Denver was due. We kept a kayak and a canoe near our dock and used it regularly on that lake, even as it was being overwhelmed by pollution, invasive plants, and noise. We defended the migrating birds who visited our lake from neighbors and government officials. We regularly argued for the preservation of the lake and its wildlife, usually unsuccessfully. A few of our neighbors were also strong advocates, including Rocky Waite (the name change advocate in the Trib article) and a few were obviously oblivious to the lake and did not consider its existence to be of value. A name change is the least the state owes this lake and its history.

Postscript: 2018

We haven't been back to Little Canada, to our old neighborhood since we moved in 2015. Last Monday, after spending a day with friends and family, we decided to take a "tour" of the place we lived for 18 years; the longest period of calling a place home in our lives. A lot had changed, a lot stayed the same, and some of it was unrecognizable. Passing by our lake, via 35E at rush hour was startling. Traffic is almost exponentially greater, noisier, and dirtier. Clearly, either the increased lane-count has attracted commuters who once took a different route or development north of St. Paul is really ramping up. I have no idea when Google took the photo [below], but I can guarantee it was not on a Monday at 3PM.

The biggest reason we bought our home on Lake Shore Avenue was the lake; Savage Lake. We liked the yard and the privacy. I loved the giant garage. Elvy loved the weird layout of the house and the potential of the basement for workspace for her art. We both loved the idea of having a home with a lake in the backyard. I realize that Minnesotans discount bodies of water like Savage Lake as if they are just holes in which to dump sewage, but the rest of the country (especially west) has a different perspective on precious water resources. Not different enough to stop pissing, shitting, and wasting their water, but at least slightly more cognizant than Minnesota where we have so much water we delude ourselves into thinking it is endless. If you look at the past entries in this blog, you'll see that we spent almost as much time in our backyard enjoying our "lake" as we did inside hiding from winter. Before we moved to Little Canada, I had never thrown a party in my life. Because of Savage Lake, we had a wedding reception, annual Little Canada Days fireworks parties, sledding parties, a college graduation bash, and dozens of get-togethers in our backyard that always included some aspect of being on the lake in boats, skis, snowshoes, sleds, or just sandals or winter boots. We hiked the lake in the winter, boated it in the summer, and enjoyed it every day we lived in Little Canada. In the end, it was the thing we both knew we would miss the most about our old home. It still is.

When we lived in the Cities, we regularly compared our industrial noise neighborhood to friends' homes and our daughter's home in Dinkytown. Other essays in this blog talk about the unhealthy expansion of noise in our old backyard and I won't beat that horse more more in this essay, but if you are fooling yourself into believing that you can live with 85dBA-and-above-noise on a constant basis you already need medical assistance.  Today, there are four lanes (two in each direction) on 35E that didn't exist when we left the Cities. If traffic expands to fill the available space, as it usually does, that probably means the noise level in my old backyard has risen by 3-8dBASPL.

NOTE: You may not be familiar with the usual verbiage used in discussing noise levels. "dBASPL" means deci (1/10) Bells (a measure of acoustic loudness) A (A-weighted to approximate the sensitivity of human hearing to sound at various loudness levels) and SPL (sound pressure level, a necessary addition because decibels are used for a variety of energy measurements from electrical to light to touch and so on). Forgetting the weighting aspect for a moment, the threshold of human hearing is 0dBSPL and the generally accepted threshold of pain is around 120dBSPL. The aspect of this specification I want to point out here is the A-weighting. Our hearing mechanism is fairly insensitive to low and high frequency sounds at low volume. A-weighting is intended to compensate for human hearing nonlinearity for sounds below 55dB (unweighted). So, anytime you see a specification like "90dBA" you should understand the "A" is being abused for some reason. The reason, in the case of sound barriers, is that low frequencies pass through most of the barriers constructed today as if that barrier is insignificant. So, using A-weighting allows the person doing the testing to discount the irritation factor of loud low frequency sounds artificially. Also, most of the loudest vehicle noises are low frequency sounds. The appropriate weighting system to use at the noise levels presented in the Savage Lake neighborhood would be C-weighting, but that would expose the ineffectiveness of the noise barrier and the health hazard residents are exposed to. 

There are lots of technical articles written about noise barriers, but "Building the Wall" probably does as good a job as any at explaining how poorly those structures work for the majority of the neighborhoods they are supposed to help. This classic and simplified description of where that 3dB of noise reduction comes from should be startlingly and discouragingly illustrative of how useless those expensive walls are at any practical distance. Flexible barriers do absorb a little noise energy, but not enough to produce much noise reduction in practical terms. The 6dB justification MNDOT and lobbyists use to justify these installations is purely political and economic. The real argument is "would you rather look at traffic or a wall?" It's not my backyard now, so I can't answer that question. I do know that at least one of our neighbors moved away a year after we left, partially because the noise became intolerable for them.

When we lived in the Cities, we would often visit friends homes or our daughter's home in Minneapolis and enjoy the relative quiet of other parts of the urban environment. Today, even the quietest of those places seems almost intolerably noise to us and, I imagine, our old backyard would be deafening; and I'm not exaggerating. Exposure to noise levels of 85dBSPL and above is a known health hazard. So, while we miss the lake we loved and the neighborhood that was our home, losing almost 30dBCSPL of noise from our backyard was a necessary sacrifice. The reason I decided to add this comment to the long-neglected and nearly-abandoned Savage Lake Blog is that the only reason this human abuse happens is that people believe there is nothing they can do about it. That is not true, but humans/citizens will have to become involved in their local, state, and federal government to fix it. Trump and the Trumpanzees imagine they can turn back the clock to the 1950's and everything will revert to the "good old days." Good luck with that, dummies. Change and the future will happen, regardless of how often Fox News tells you it won't. The country can change for the better or worse, but it will never go back to what we imagined it was 60 years ago.

MnDOT & Little Canada Sound Barrier Final Proposal

The city's MN Pass Municipal Concent document was delivered to everyone concerned in February. It's worth reading. Apparently, construction on the Mn Pass lane and the rest of the project should begin this summer.

One of the statements in the document that I thought was most "entertaining" was one that stated:


The idea that this giant sand "island" could have come from anything other than MnDOT's crappy drainage design is a huge warning that some monkey business is likely to result from an assortment of bureacrats passing the blame around until the barrier is built and nothing is done about the sediment damage. Any idiot can see the drainage pipe is completely buried and backed up and that the overspill from the ramp is continuing to deposit crap into the lake. Over the years since the last construction, I've watched the characters from the Watershed District paddle out, measure random stuff and paddle back without anything good coming from their "efforst." Even to them, it ought to be obvious where that sediment is coming from. For about a year, there was a plume of crap spreading out from the pipe after every rainstorm. It only took a year for the pipe to clog and the damage to be pretty much complete. However, in the years I've spent fighting for our disregarded and damaged lake I've found that MnDOT and, especially, the DNR hire specially "talented" idiots with no clue, concern, work ethic, or personal honesty. The best we can do is hope for the best, but expect the worst.

Both ends of the lake, northeast and southeast, have been harmed by excessive freeway runoff. The old docks at the southeast end have been hauled out of the water and twisted out of shape by the obscene amounts of sediment runoff. The new Gopher drainage design just dumps Gopher's parking lot crap straight into the lake. At this rate, we can probably expect the lake to fill in a few years and development to being in the resulting mosquito swamp. Sometimes it feels like we're living in Florida (and that is not a compliment).

Winter Lake Status

I can't explain why, but one of the things we love about our abused and battered little lake is walking on the ice on a moderate winter day. There is something oddly cool about making a lap or two around the island when the sun is out, the lake is frozen solid, and traffic is blasting past us, oblivious of our presence. It's not quiet. It's miles from pastoral, but it is oddly peaceful. A little more snow and the lake would be cross-country ski-able. A little less and, I guess, you could skate it. Before the winter hammer fell on Last Saturday, we were out on the lake enjoying the moderate temperature and windless day.

A few years ago, this was a 3' diameter concrete
culvert. Today, it's packed with freeway sediment.

The lake's level is as low as it has been in years. So low that I was able to take some pretty pointed pictures (say that 3X fast) of the damage MNDOT's past "engineering" has done to our lake. For example, smack in the middle of this shot is what remains of a drainage culvert MNDOT used to drain water (and massive quantities of sediment) from the south-bound I35E Little Canada Road freeway entrance. When we moved to Little Canada in 1997, this drainage culvert was completely exposed and the lake was approximately 4' deep about a canoe paddle's length away from the culvert. That general condition and relative height stayed constant for years (discounting the catastrophic lake level drop when the Watershed District screwed up the water levels at the end of the 1990's) until the freeway redesign a few years ago.

This picture gives some perspective on how large the
sediment "beach" is, at least the above water line.

For a couple of seasons, all of the freeway entrance ramp drainage was routed through this culvert and over the edge of the ramp's curbs until the drainage culvert was filled with sediment. The rest of the silt and sediment is simply poured off of the ramp into the lake, resulting in a dramatically eroded lake shore and an increasingly steep bank. At one time, this was the deep end of the lake by several feet. There was some source of water movement that always kept the ice either thin or clear about 30' west of this point, but after the freeway redesign the massive influx of sediment filled in that source of current and helped allow the nearly complete coverage of water lilies by making the lake shallow enough for them to take root. The sediment shelf is completely above the water-line right now and anyone can walk out and examine the damage done. You can also see the erosion effect by looking at the freeway fence posts. The concrete post footers are being rapidly exposed as the lake bank vanishes from runoff erosion.

This was my first opportunity to see the Little Canada-funded Gopher Electronics parking lot drainage plan and I'm not particularly impressed. We gave this design a shot on the drainage pipe at the south end of our property about 12 years ago and it worked for a season, but was quickly overwhelmed by the quantity of sediment pouring into the lake from Lake Shore Ave and the sediment "island" has continued to expand since. This design is not a "trap," but is more like a temporary diversion with a little landscaping.

Sediment traps are either holding ponds, like those we see along the eastbound sections of the new I694 design, or complicated concrete affairs that have to be regularly maintained. Any man-made system requires maintenance and that is often the fatal flaw in major construction designs. The designs are fine, but the follow-up is insufficient or non-existent. Supposedly, we have traps like the ones illustrated in the mechanical drawings (on the left) for all of our street drains, but if no one cleans the traps they were one more waste of taxpayer dollars.

It's not like all of this hasn't been reported to the city, county, and state in the past, but if you'd like to see what's really going on with our lake, now is the time to take a walk on the ice. Worst case, the lake is about 4' deep at the deepest spot right now. The water levels are probably 2' below where they were early last spring.

If we get the noise barriers and the construction of those barriers doesn't do more harm than good, the quality-of-life value of our lake could improve dramatically. It would be nice to get some of this street and freeway drainage problem solved at the same time so that the lake just doesn't slowly fill with sediment and become a mosquito breeding ground.

Noise Barrier Modfied

As I wrote a short time back, the commercial interests of Gopher Electronic's owner appears to have some over-riding influence on the barrier construction. The current design, as of November 27, per Jennie Read, PE, North Area Engineer - Ramsey County, (jennifer.read@state.mn.us) is described in the figure below:

I have, as usual, a couple of concerns. It makes sense to begin to taper the wall down as it approaches Little Canada Road. A visual obstruction for vehicles from the west turning south onto the I35E entrance would be a safety hazard. However, terminating the wall at the current location ignores the health and quiet of our neighbors on Australian Avenue. The two issues that will cause their noise levels to be untouched (regardless of the oddly derived MNDOT estimates) are the gap left between the noise source (I35E) and the reflection caused by the earlier east side noise wall. The photo below illustrates that the east wall is nicely lined up to reflect noise from that side of the freeway into the neighborhood directly across the intersection.

Simply extending the wall to match the new east side barrier is not enough to correct the damage done by the original (and poorly considered) noise barrier design. While it might be inconvenient for the business owners to have to install higher signage to be visible to the tiny fraction of drivers who will be looking for signs while negotiating a hazardous section of freeway, the cost to the homeowners should come first for both MNDOT and the City of Little Canada's local government.

Having seen the original noise level estimates made by MNDOT which were used to justify why noise barriers were not recommended when the freeway was expanded, I'm unimpressed by the random numbers their "engineers" have applied to expectations of noise reductions in the neighborhoods. The closer the properties are to the noise barrier, the more effective the barrier will be. Even MNDOT "experts" should know this fact.

Honestly, the more I see these characters abuse science, the more I am convinced of Thomas Huxley's condemnation of the three classes of witnesses, "liars, damned liars, and experts." At least with these new estimates in hand, I will have data to work with in collecting measurements over the next few seasons before the wall is constructed. After the wall is built, it will be interesting to hear the MNDOT excuses for why their numbers, again, failed to approach reality. Before the previous I35E expansion and noise wall construction, the MNDOT optimistic guesses regarding the effects on our property defied logic and science and were, as expected, wrong. Instead of "less than 3dB" of change in the abusive noise levels on our properties, the new traffic expansion increased levels by 5-9dBA and 8-14dBC.

The Little Canada residents living along the south end of the existing west side wall (1o-3o on the MNDOT map above) have voted against the extension of the wall. I suspect it is because they are receiving as much benefit from the existing trees as they expect from a new wall. Due to medical issues, I was not able to attend the November 28 City Council meeting where they expressed their opinions. However, it will be critical for the city and residents to carefully monitor any MNDOT "enhancements" to the existing tree protection, if that becomes part of the plan. When MNDOT planted 4' trees on the west side (near the 1n location on the MNDOT map above), the state's employees cut down several existing 20' trees to "make room" for the new starter plants. Obviously, that was counter-productive and should not be repeated.

Variations on the Noise Wall

Apparently, the Little Canada City Council is doing an end run around the will of the property owners on Australia Avenue. The owner of Gopher Electronics convinced the council that his property will somehow be damaged if there isn't a line-of-sight from the freeway to his building and that his tiny building provides ample noise protection for the people who live on the streets "blocked" by his building. So, the council is looking at (or has already decided on) shrinking the length of the northwest side of the proposed noise wall for his benefit.

Obviously, this completely eliminates the value of the noise wall for 2/3 of the residents on the west side of the freeway. As the DOT's own literature states, effective noise barriers must:

• must be tall and long with no openings;
• are most effective within 61 meters (200 feet) of a highway (usually the first row of homes);
• a barrier should be at least eight times as long as the distance from the home or receiver to the barrier;

There was no indication of this conversation in the currently posted 10/24/2012 meeting notes, but a resident who attended that meeting said there was quite a bit of off-line discussion about the "variation."
 Reducing the length of the barrier will effect the efficiency of the barrier for far more than just the citizens "protected" by the Gopher building. It will eliminate much of the barrier's effect for most of us on the west side.Since Gopher Electronics has been accused of being the cause of a lot of the lake's degradation over the years, it is hard to see why the city would be suddenly concerned about that business' input regarding the neighborhood.

There is still some time for public input before this project is turned over to the bureaucracy. "The Administrator reported that MN DOT is requesting that the City hold a public hearing on the MN PASS project, and staff is recommending the hearing be held on Wednesday, November 28th at 7:30 p.m. The Administrator pointed out that last evening MN DOT held an open house on the project at City Hall. The issue of sound walls was discussed with residents, and there are some areas abutting the project where property owners favor additional sound walls and some not. The Administrator noted that the Heather Oaks property owners abutting the project do not support the addition of a sound wall, but would like to have additional landscaping installed." Stay tuned, this "discussion" isn't over yet.

The fact that none of the council members or the mayor are opposed in the upcoming election is probably bad news for the city. It says we're either completely satisfied with city government, we're completely apathetic about our homes and community, or we're afraid to raise out heads up because they might get shot off.

More Damage from MnDOT?

Just when it appeared that our lake might recover from the abuses of MnDOT and the neglect of the rest of our state and city government, here comes more "improvments" to 35E:

-----Original Message-----
From: Peterson, Scott (DOT) [mailto:scott.r.peterson@state.mn.us]
Sent: Wednesday, May 25, 2011 3:03 PM
To: Bev Scalze
Subject: RE: MN PASS lane, 694 to 94

Rep. Scalze,

Here's additional information about the MnPASS project on 35E from the folks involved in the project.

The MnPASS lane (both directions) from St. Paul to Little Canada Road will tie into to existing lanes constructed as part of the unweave the weave project. There is no proposed widening southbound between Little Canada Road and TH 36 because four lanes exist today, but there will be widening northbound from TH 36 to Little Canada Road to add MnPASS lane since only three lanes exist today. Every effort will be taken to minimize impacts to east side of 35E in this area. A noise analysis is being done as part of the Cayuga project to determine noise levels and mitigation efforts.

--------------
From: Bev Scalze [mailto:Rep.Bev.Scalze@house.mn]
Sent: Monday, May 23, 2011 2:58 PM
To: Peterson, Scott (DOT)
Subject: Re: MN PASS lane, 694 to 94

Thanks, Scott.

Bev Scalze
State Representative, 54B
259 State Office Building
100 Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr Blvd
St. Paul MN 55155
651/296-7153
rep.bev.scalze@house.mn

"Peterson, Scott (DOT)" 5/23/2011 2:55 PM

I have already sent a request for additional information. I will let you know as soon as I hear anything.

--------------
From: Bev Scalze [mailto:Rep.Bev.Scalze@house.mn]
Sent: Monday, May 23, 2011 02:40 PM
To: Peterson, Scott (DOT)
Cc: joel.hanson@ci.little-canada.mn.us
Subject: Re: MN PASS lane, 694 to 94

Scott,

Thanks for the quick reply.

If Little Canada Road is the beginning of the MnPass project, there may be a problem. The Little Canada Road/35E intersection is at the northern end of Savage Lake. If there are any "added" lanes south of Little Canada Road, that is the section where the 10 lanes of asphalt go through the middle of Savage Lake. There would be a problem with the lakeshore homeowners on Savage Lake.

I would like to know if the plans include any new fill or asphalt to be added south of Little Canada Road in the area of Savage Lake.

Bev Scalze
State Representative, 54B
259 State Office Building
100 Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr Blvd
St. Paul MN 55155
651/296-7153
rep.bev.scalze@house.mn

--------------
"Peterson, Scott (DOT)" 5/23/2011 1:46 PM

I think it is Little Canada Rd.

--------------
From: Bev Scalze [mailto:Rep.Bev.Scalze@house.mn]
Sent: Monday, May 23, 2011 01:28 PM
To: Peterson, Scott (DOT)
Subject: Re: MN PASS lane, 694 to 94

Scott,

So then the southern limits of the "Unweave the Weave" improvements would be Highway 36?

Bev Scalze
State Representative, 54B
259 State Office Building
100 Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr Blvd
St. Paul MN 55155
651/296-7153
rep.bev.scalze@house.mn

--------------
"Peterson, Scott (DOT)" 5/23/2011 1:15 PM

Rep. Scalze,

Actually the additional lane for MnPass will only extend to the southern limits of the improvements made as part of the "unweave the weave" project. We just use 694 as the northern limit because that gives most people a better understanding of where it will be.

I will double check with our Metro folks to see if there is going to be any additional impact in that area.

Scott R. Peterson
Director, Office of Government Affairs
Minnesota Department of Transportation
395 John Ireland Blvd.
St. Paul, Mn 55155

--------------
On May 23, 2011, at 1:01 PM, "Bev Scalze" wrote:

Scott,

Regarding the proposed amendment to Rep. Beard's Transportation bill, I have a question for you.

The memo that I just received details the "added" MN Pass lane in the vicinity of 694 to 94.

I have concerns about any extra lanes in the area of Little Canada Road. The present 10 lanes of asphalt that currently run through Savage Lake, have severely impacted the quality of life and the quality of the water in Savage Lake. The people who live there have been there for a long time, some for 75 years.

Savage Lake was once one lake, with very clean water. Freeway 35E was constructed through the middle of Savage Lake, beginning in 1959. Lanes have been added since then, and the residents are outraged that the value of their lakeshore property has been severely eroded by actions of the state.

Can you assure me that there will be no extra fill and asphalt used for the "added" Mn PASS lane?

This is a very important issue in Little Canada.

Bev Scalze
State Representative, 54B
259 State Office Building
100 Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr Blvd
St. Paul MN 55155
651/296-7153
rep.bev.scalze@house.mn