Originally published September 1, 2010 at 7:28 p.m., updated September 1, 2010 at 7:50 p.m.
The Kaw River Water Treatment Plant is one of the facilities that is responsible for cleaning up the drinking water for the city of Lawrence. Recently, algae from Clinton Lake and the Kansas River has made its way into the drinking water and the water treatment facilities are working to get the drinking water back to normal by the end of this week.
The water may taste a little less funky, but problems with Lawrence’s drinking water supply have only just begun.
The Kansas River is pumping smelly water to town from an upstream reservoir, Tuttle Creek Lake near Manhattan, Kansas, according to the Kansas Health and Environment Department.
Usually, Clinton Lake is the source of weirdness in the city’s water, because of a blue-green algae bloom in the lake that creates the smelly compounds MIB and geosmin. But this time, the guilty bloom is in Tuttle Creek Lake.
The bloom will die soon and Lawrence residents will have temporary relief from the awkward taste and odor. But the funky water is just the beginning of ways that Lawrence – and cities all over the Midwest – is facing the limitations of reservoir water.
“They try to build reservoirs for a specific life span, assuming in 100 years we’ll have found a different solution,” Don Huggins, an aquatic ecologist at the Kansas Biological Reserve, said. “The problem is some of our reservoirs are filling faster than what’s projected.”
Every reservoir – including Clinton Lake – is slowly filling with sediment from in-flowing rivers, and will eventually be unusable.
“We ought to be focusing, right now, on what we can do to prolong the life of the reservoir,” Huggins said. “That means better watershed management and better lake management.”
Taking steps to fix aging reservoirs through methods like dredging them are often too expensive for cities to perform without more money.
“The shallower our reservoirs get, the less water we’ll have available for our use, and probably the water quality will get worse – not only in terms of supporting recreational fishing and aquatic life, but also of drinking water.”
The shallower the lake is, the more opportunity for wind to stir the water, throwing the settled nutrients up from the bottom. That allows more blue-green algae to grow, so expect funky water more often as reservoirs fill up with sediment over time. Even if the algae isn’t terribly dangerous, the increase in the blue-green algae’s presence is an indication that the reservoirs are getting older, Huggins said.
And that means time is running out.
“That’s where we get involved. You have to start thinking about how you use water and how you waste water,” Huggins said. “I know that’s the last thing people want to consider. ‘Why can’t I have all that I want? It’s a natural resource’ – but it has a finite availability.”
Limiting the sediment that goes into rivers would help delay Clinton Lake’s expiration date, but so would conserving the use of its water.
“If students at KU were more aware of that, and were aware of remedies of that, like conserving, they would be very likely to speak up and give some effort to solve those problems,” said Marshall Wetta, a junior from Silver Lake.
While it won’t solve the problem of either rejuvenating local reservoirs or finding another source of water, students can help prolong the use of water from Clinton Lake and other reservoirs by conserving the amount of water they use.
“That’s something, as citizens, we’ve got to come to understand. Managing our water resources is going to take more of an effort,” Huggins said. “I suspect that, throughout the Great Plains, we’re all facing the same issues. It’s just that we haven’t pulled our heads out of the sand.”
— Edited by Michael Bednar
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