Who would have thought?

Greetings from the Lake of the Ozarks! Caroline Toole, here, working with LOWA (Lake of the Ozarks Watershed Alliance) and AmeriCorps (MO Clean Water AmeriCorps Program, hosted by MO River Communities Network (MRCN)), in service to our community! Brrr! We’ve been needing a nice, cold winter!
My first few months with LOWA have been quite the learning curve! Not unlike my first impression of teaching when I truly wondered what I had gotten myself into, last fall I had no idea what “writing a watershed management plan” entailed. What, you might ask, is a watershed management plan? Simply put, it is a plan to manage a watershed. LOL! If it were only that easy! A watershed management plan begins by talking to the stakeholders of the watershed and determining what are the issues with which people are concerned? LOWA began in 2006 by surveying the stakeholders around the Lake of the Ozarks, which in itself is no easy task considering LOZ touches 4 counties and has 1,150 miles of shoreline. But meetings were held at several locations and time after time the citizens said safety and water quality were their main concerns. One of the first projects in which LOWA became involved was the E. coli cove study that AmerenUE and MDNR were designing. With LOWA’s volunteers out on the Lake collecting samples, the scope of the study was tripled and the results started coming in! People seemed surprised! The Lake wasn’t so bad after all! Except for a couple of hot spots which MDNR traced to faulty and poorly managed waste treatment sites, the coves sampled that first year had almost no E. coli. The second year of the study, which moved up the Lake to sample a new set of coves, showed much the same results as the first year, not much E. coli at all. And then the third year began and the day of the first set of samples followed some heavy rains that had washed a lot of material into the Lake, and almost half the samples came back too high for E. coli. These were the infamous results that MDNR decided to wait on before releasing. What wasn’t reported was that a few days later, with subsequent sampling and testing, the Lake was back down to normal. Well, what followed is history and still history in the making, but to me the important message was that the watershed of the Lake was allowing too much material to wash into the Lake. Where was the riparian buffer around the Lake’s shores holding the material on the land, holding back the flow of stormwater so the precious rains can soak into the ground and replenish the aquifer? When LOWA began in earnest to write its watershed management plan (WMP) and began to identify the factors that could and do stress the lake, 3 main issues arose: too much sediment washing into the Lake, too many nutrients entering the Lake, and the issue of E. coli bacteria. What to do? In my next blog, I’ll discuss some “solutions” LOWA wrote into its WMP, which include some pretty exciting ideas for controlling stormwater runoff, like establishing rain gardens and rain barrels, along with LOWA LILs (Low-Impact Landscapes) and watershed-friendly green spaces all around the Lake! Winter is a great time for planning so that when spring finally arrives … well, watch out! Stay safe, stay warm, think globally, act locally.