Dan's Papers - May 22, 2009

Here's a first for the Hamptons. Lake Agawam, yes, the lake in the center of downtown Southampton, has started its own website. It's lakeagawam.com and if you go there you will, (I think, when they finally get it fully up), be able to blog or twitter back and forth with the lake itself.

The lake has been sick for the last decade or two. It's full of algae and phosphorous and nitrogen, sometimes turns bright green with algae and other times kills lots of the fish that turn belly up for lack of oxygen. Years ago people sailed on this pond or took out rowboats. No more. To the best of my knowledge, there is no longer even a boat ramp to get a boat into Lake Agawam. If you were to row out into the lake and dawdle your hand over the side into the water, it might just be all gone when you go to bring it back in. What a mess.

Boo hoo, says the lake, although, so far anyway, not on its website. The website has no sound and no video, just lots of charts and gauges and data that monitor some of the scientific studies being done in the lake, some of them on a day to day basis. If you want, you can see, every day, the change in the microcytin levels which control the algae blooms, or the phycocyam levels that monitor oxygen levels and see how when they get low the fish to gasp and die.

The lake itself has had lots of help setting up this website. An organization called Lake Agawam Conservation Association, put together in 2007 by the well-to-do residents who have mansions around the lake, is being helpful by raising money for the website and to fix the lake. The Southampton Town Trustees, which own the bottom of the lake, are involved. So is Stony Brook Southampton College, which volunteered students last year to create the website. Meanwhile, there are many scientists and planners and officials and environmentalists who are working hard on getting the lake as sparkling clean as it was 50 years ago. There's even a plan put forward to build a boathouse and boat dock near the playground in Lake Agawam Park so once it is all cleaned up, people can go out on the lake and sail and relax.

Scientists have determined that the main cause of the pollution is ground water and storm water runoff. Ground water carries heavy doses of nutrients from wastewater. Storm water, coming in largely from a drain on the north end of the pond that collects water from the whole downtown, brings with it lawn fertilizer, nitrogen and phosphorous.

So far, with the lake's approval, lots of action has already been taken to try to clean the water. People with homes fronting on the lake have been urged to not fertilize within 175 feet of the shoreline, and to instruct their gardeners to use biodegradable fertilizer rather than high chemical content fertilizer on their lawns. The village, earlier this year, requested $2.3 million in federal funds for storm water abatement and recharge projects. There is a dry well project now just getting completed at the foot of Jobs Lane. And there is in the works, though it's still awaiting approval, a plan to build a sewage treatment plant and more piping to reroute the ground water. Meanwhile, the Town Trustees have already installed six oxygen bubblers at the south end of the lake to re-oxygenate the water to keep fish healthy and free from suffocation.

I think if I were the lake, and they were to install audio on the site, I would say, while still gasping for air, thank you very much to a whole lot of people and organizations, including Dr. Christopher Gobler of Stony Brook Southampton College, Mayor Mark Epley of Southampton Village, Chuck Scarborough, David Bohnett and Whitney Stevens and the others who founded and today run the LACA, the Town Trustees, such as Fred Havermeyer, the firm of Nelson, Pope and Voorhis, who last October presented a management plan for the lake, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention for its recent warning that cyanobacterial levels in the lake could become converted to mist that could be toxic to humans, Southampton Town Supervisor Linda Kabot, the Southampton Village Highway Department for the storm drains and the dry wells and, well, click here:

"(Gasp) thank you all, everyone, (gasp), I am sure you are all helping out in every way you can (gasp) and I just hope I can hang on for just a little longer until the tide turns."