LAKEPORT >> California’s largest freshwater lake, has been plagued by the influx of these cyanobacteria since a large outbreak occurred in 2009, creating an unpleasant odor and perhaps posing a threat to public health in the warmer months.
The Lake County Resource Managers Committee (RMC) gathered federal, state and local agencies with jurisdiction over Clear Lake to discuss algae blooms on Thursday at the county courthouse, wielding PowerPoint slides against the problem.
Moderated by District 3 Supervisor Jim Steele, the meeting consisted of seven presentations. Each one offered a different perspective about the issue.
“It was very important to get the message out to the public,” Steele said. “These tax-funded agencies are all working towards protecting Clear Lake as a valuable resource.”
Ultimately, the goal of the committee is to increase cooperation between all these groups and pool their knowledge to develop a better understanding of the causes behind harmful algae blooms that introduce toxins into the aquatic environment. The lake is the source of water for nearly half of the county’s water customers.
Due to the bacteria’s nature, Sarah Ryan of the Big Valley Band of Pomo Indians and Karola Kennedy of the Elem Indian Colony reported that a consistent warning system is hard to create.
Since 2014, the environmental directors have monitored the toxin levels around Clearlake in addition to the waters their tribes use. With help and funding from the U.S. EPA they currently monitor 18 different sites.
From those two years of testing they concluded that the presence of those toxins are hard to predict because some blooms had no toxicity while high levels were found in clear water.
“It rises and crashes really quickly,” Ryan said, noting that blooms are highest in the Clearlake Oaks and Lower Lake Arms. “That’s the really interesting thing.”
Another difficult thing to predict is what elements and molecules in sediment runoff allow these bacteria to thrive.
The main suspect, according to the Central Valley Water Control Board, is phosphorus imbalance found in the local watershed. Because of this, the water board required Lake County, watershed managers, and local agriculture to take on a Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL).
This regulation placed a cap on phosphorus loading to the lake and set a goal to cut pollution of the element by 40 percent by 2017. That goal, board representatives said, most likely won’t be reached as projects — mainly, the Middle Creek wetland restoration — are delayed.
Furthermore, the Department of Water Resources didn’t agree with the TMDL when it was established in 2006. According to Steele, the department felt that it didn’t account for all the other nutrients and the lake’s processes that lead to the problem.
This missing data and research is what the supervisor said he’s looking for as he begins to tackle the problem.
“Everyone reads the data differently,” he said. “There is a focus on what kind of data is missing from the puzzle as we are trying to build and figure out the best practices that lead to a normal cycle in the lake.”
Representatives from the U.S. Forest Service, Lake County Farm Bureau, and the Department of Fish and Wildlife also gave reports at the meeting.
