This lake drains into the St. Marys River and ends up in Lake Erie, how much gets added along the way? Lake St. Marys was just like Lake Erie years ago a good place to fish and when I first noticed it I didn't think to much about it. But now when I see what has happened to Lake St. Marys I fear what is happening on Erie.


Kudos to our Watershed Hero's
Editorial: Grand Lake Saint Marys is text book mess
By the Dayton Daily News | Tuesday, July 20, 2010, 05:09 PM

The ecological and economic tragedy at Grand Lake St. Marys is stunning. Think of Ohio’s largest inland lake like a bathtub. If runoff loaded with phosphorous from manure and fertilizer keeps flowing into the tub, eventually the water is going to turn so foul, you won’t want to get in it. And anything good in it will die. Cyanobacteria feeds on the phosphorous, which sucks the oxygen — and the life — out of the water. Grand Lake St. Marys is an especially sensitive lake. Water flows slowly through the 13,000-acre reservoir, meaning it only gets “flushed” every 18 months. In addition, the lake doesn’t have a lot of islands or channels, which prevent erosion and filter out bad stuff. Most significant, the state’s largest concentration of animal farms are nearby. Manure-tainted runoff is poison to the lake, and it has been building up over decades. With government now telling people not to go near the water, Grand Lake St. Marys’ tourism business is dead. That’s as much as a $200-million-a-year industry. That business, however, pales in comparison to the local agricultural industry, which is estimated at $675 million. Needless to say, agri-business has intense clout. In a way, Grand Lake St. Marys is Ohio’s BP disaster. The damage isn’t nearly as extensive, but the cleanup will take years. Moreover, people are feeling their way because no one has a formula for fixing something that’s been so violated. Unlike the oil spill in the Gulf, however, Grand Lake St. Marys didn’t get fouled in an instant because a specific piece of equipment failed. It happened because multitudes of people failed — over years. The algae blooms have become more frequent, and even as efforts have been made to limit pollution, there was no sense that time could run out.

Some people are comparing Grand Lake St. Marys to Indian Lake. Indian Lake is also shallow and man-made, vulnerable to similar threats. Even setting aside the differences — that Indian Lake recharges more quickly, that it has more shoreline, that row crops are more prevalent in that region than manure-producing animal farms — it, too, could be on life-support today. But locals came together years ago — the agricultural community and people who valued the lake — and figured out what had to be done differently. One observer notes that both communities live under the same laws, but, in one case, something was preserved; in the other, something was allowed to be destroyed. It’s hard not to see the different results as statements about local leadership.

At this point, experts are still trying to get their arms around the extent of the problem, whether there’s a way to clean up the lake, and how much it might cost. If alum is poured on the water, if dredging equipment is brought in, the fix will be expensive, running into the millions. That money won’t come from the local community, but from the federal and state governments. (Just on Tuesday, the federal government kicked in $1 million.) Whatever is done, all of us will be paying for the fact that the Grand Lake St. Marys community couldn’t come together on how to protect a resource, and neither the federal or state environmental protection agencies knocked heads when people decided to do too little.......The one sure thing is that everyone will have a long time to work out differences. No amount of money can fix Grand Lake St. Marys quickly