Downgrading "Lake"

Here's what Ramsey County has to say about Savage Lake, "Because it is divided by the highway, the eastern and western basins of the lake are connected by a pipe that flows from the west basin into the southwest corner of the eastern basin. Although called a lake, Savage Lake is actually a 27-acre wetland. West Savage Lake is 17.4 acres with a maximum depth of 5.9 feet; East Savage Lake is 9.6 acres with a maximum depth of 5.7 feet." At least they have a nice picture of the lake from a view that no longer exists thanks to their "noise wall." 

It was, of course, a lake before MNDOT decided to dump a 1/2 mile dirt "bridge" into the lake, flooding the east side neighborhood when the ice melted and swamped yards and homes that were near the waterline. This was one of Minnesota's many savage attempts to bury native American history under "progress." Bridging the lake wasn't good enough for the state's lake wreckers. In 2011, MNDOT began the freeway construction that would finish off Savage Lake and, ironically, jam up MNDOT's freeway entrance drainage at the same time. Once the lake's spring source was plugged and the freeways were draining into the lake from both ends, on the west side of the lake, the "lake" status was history. Between MNDOT's abuse and the DNR's lethargy, Savage Lake was doomed by a corrupt, lazy, and incompetent pair of bureaucracies and a county and city government that was too busy packing its pockets with development money to bother with protecting the city's natural resources.

Is This Irony?

The Ramsey-Washington Watershed District has an entry about the botched-up drain they installed in 2003 and modified several times before getting it as close to right as they ever do anything: Savage Lake Outlet Improvement.They sarcastically claim, "Prior to the project, the outlet from Savage Lake was highly susceptible to plugging, which caused extended elevated water levels in the lake. City maintenance crews frequently removed sticks and other debris from the outlet.

"During the winter of 2003-04, we installed a new outlet structure that would operate at full system capacity even if 80 percent plugged. The outlet stabilizes normal water levels in the lake and allows flood levels to subside much sooner than before."

One of the advantages of getting to review your own work is that you don't have to even pay lip-service to facts or reality.

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.

Safety Issue

This is off of the subject of our depleted lake resource, but every time I walk this route I'm reminded of how dangerous a neighborhood can become. At the intersection of Jackson and Demont (See figure at right, marker "A"), there is a pedestrian crosswalk. In the 15 years I have lived in this neighborhood I have yet to see a single vehicle stop for pedestrians in that intersections. I have, however, seen cell-phone impaired drivers tear through the intersection while students from the high school try to cross that street even to the point of seeing one zombie in a club-cab pickup nearly wipe out a girls' running team. Sadly, even the Ramsey County Sheriff's department deputies don't appear to recognize the pedestrian right-of-way. Sooner or later, someone is going to get killed at that intersection and we should all do whatever we can to prevent that tragedy.

Between notifying the sheriff's department (651/248-2449 or tim.entner@co.ramsey.mn.us) and the Metropolitan Council (james.andrew@metc.state.mn.us and 651/602-1721) we ought to be able to get some attention paid to this intersection.

Last Spraying

We received our permit to spray the lake for water lilies one last time (on the city's buck) early this week. We need at least two dry days for Rodeo to do it's work and the weather report for the weekend seemed sort of undependable up until this morning, so I didn't get the paperwork into the DNR in time. I hope to try again next week. This has been an over-full week for me as it is.

I hate to toss in the towel, but I think this labor of frustration and solitude is about to end. I named this website/blog the "Savage Lake, Little Canada, Minnesota Lake Owners' Association" with the hopelessly optimistic goal that there might actually be such a group in the near future. The website has been around since May of 2008 and we're no closer to being that organization than we were when I wrote the first entry, "Getting Started." Someone said, "You get the government you deserve." With that in mind, I think we are getting the mosquito infested swamp we deserve as we passively let this small body of water deteriorate into mess it has become. I loved our little lake a few years ago. Today, it has become a liability.

It is nothing but painful to me to look out of my backyard and see the lake we once enjoyed become the disaster the Watershed District so desperately and incompetently wanted it to be. Not that many years ago, we canoed this lake almost every summer evening. On muggy days, we'd paddle to the interior of the lake to avoid bugs in the backyard. Now, the lilies have made fine nesting homes for every kind of biting insect that lives in Minnesota and the lake is the last place you want to be when the damn things are out hunting. One of our neighbors has been trying to sell his home for a while and at least one prospective buyer stated that they lost interested in the home because of the freeway noise. A more interested buyer would probably have second thoughts after experiencing the insect "wildlife" some evening. Our backyard is worse than our front yard and simply crossing the street is enough to reduce the need for bug repellent considerably.

John Bibeau has, again, volunteered to help spray the lake this last time. I'll use this website to post when that will be as soon as we set a date with the DNR. After that, I'm going to shut the site down. I'm too old to bang my head against a closed door.

Where We Are Today

I stopped by the city offices last week to look at the plans for the upgrades to I35E between Highway 36 and the I35E and I694 rats' nest, but the city doesn't have anything to show, yet. Supposedly, we're going to be getting some noise abatement design into the work, but based on the amateur work I saw from the state with the "analysis" of the impact on our homes with the last work on that roadway, I don't expect much value from that. Honestly, if one of my Musical Acoustics students turned in a final project that was as poorly written and analyzed, I'd fail him.

[Note: The clear weather pictures above are from early June and the overcast pictures were taken 6/21/2011.]
The lake water height has been at historic levels almost all spring, thanks to an extremely wet spring. That hasn't, however, had much impact on the lily growth. It is gratifying to see that last fall's Rodeo spraying has given us some clear water this spring, which indicates that we could get control of this pest weed if the DNR weren't an obstacle and the Water Shed District made some sort of useful contribution. Unlike this time last year, we've been able to canoe the lake in the evening and, other than the dramatic increase in mosquitoes, it's nice to have some of our lake back.

The milfoil is another issue. I found some minnows tangled in that crap near our dock, which is a great demonstration of how destructive that weed is. You'd think the DNR and Watershed District would want to aggressively control this crap at the headwaters of our county's major lakes, since lakes like ours feeds all of the big lakes and there will be no way to get rid of the weed without getting rid of it upstream.

There was some noise about how the city was going to make one last contribution to lake shore owner DNR weed eradication permits, but I haven't heard anything new on that subject either. Regarding the milfoil, it almost seems like we're going to have to get out on our shorelines with a rake and drag the junk out of the lake manually.

Speaking of the Watershed District, they use our lake access to make some sort of water sample, drainage analysis a few times every year. I don't know what results from that testing, but you'd think it would be the kind of thing they'd make available to lake shore owners and the city. Anyone have an idea where that information might exist?

Our pair loons left town a couple of weeks ago. I'd become used to hearing them trumpet every morning and when it stopped it seemed like a good neighbor had moved away. I guess we should just feel lucky to have had them for as long as we did.