Dan's Papers - April 3, 2009 - Red Tide Be Gone

For the last 15 years, the waters in our bays and ponds have suffered from horrendous bouts of algae blooms that kill the fish and turn clear water into an unswimmable, ugly muck of red and brown goop. The algae blooms last weeks or months, and then disappear. There seems to be no rhyme or reason for them.

Scientists for years have scratched their heads about this. Study after study has been done. The blooms seem to come when there are high levels of phosphorous and nitrogen in the water. But that's about all they can tell us. Nobody yet has figured out how to stop algae blooms.

And yet, there is one group of private citizens who believe, or for the last three years have believed, they can stop algae blooms.

The group consists of the homeowners who live on the landscaped estates that surround Mill Pond, a modest, oval shaped body of water north of downtown Water Mill, or, as they have declared it, Lake Nowedonah, which they have chosen because they believe that the lovely Shinnecock Indian maiden Nowedonah may have sat on the banks of the pond sometime in the 17th century. The group is named Friends of Lake Nowedonah.

Three years ago, this group petitioned the Southampton Town Trustees, the group that owns all bay and pond bottoms in the Town, to allow them to spend $60,000 to install three noisy, circular, floating 10-foot wide and six-foot high water stirrers that they wanted to anchor in the center of the pond. These stirrers would be leased for one summer for that amount of money from a firm called SolarBee, which claimed that they would banish the algae blooms. They said that algae blooms were caused by a natural inversion of pond water, where the oxygen-starved water near the bottom is inverted with the oxygen-rich water near the top, resulting in dead fish and algae. They were prepared to install their SolarBees to solve the problem in the summer of 2006.

The trustees denied their request for 2006, but after a more urgent bout of algae bloom, agreed to allow the SolarBees for 2007. Unfortunately, the algae bloom appeared as before and, in the fall, when the SolarBees technicians came, they concluded that the SolarBees had been installed wrong, and had sucked mud, seagrass and other gunk into the engines. For 2008, success would be guaranteed once they adjusted the engine speeds.

In 2008, with further permission from the trustees, the SolarBees were once again installed, and once again the algae bloom came back.

The trustees themselves had the water tested and concluded in the fall that Mill Pond was suffering from high levels of phosphorous and nitrogen, and, it appeared, that the phosphorous that had been settling at the pond's bottom had merely been stirred up by the SolarBees.

Nevertheless, the Friends of Lake Noahdonah have once again requested that the trustees approve SolarBees for the summer of 2009. They wish, once again - with their landscapers spraying and sprinkling massive amounts of phosphorous and nitrogen chemicals on their lawns which then trickle down the slopes of their property and into the pond - to watch the SolarBees whirring around out there, fighting for all that's right and just in America.

The trustees say they will make a decision before the end of the month about this, but at this point, it does not look as if they have the votes to authorize another year.