The main stem of the Clearwater River and Lake Louisa exceed state-allowed levels for water pollutants, local watershed officials say. They have been deemed impaired for several years and are in desperate need of cleanup. The Clearwater River Watershed District Board will hold its first meeting Wednesday, Dec. 17, in a multi-phase project to clean Lake Louisa, located between South Haven and Kimball, and the Clearwater River west of State Highway 15 toward Watkins. The meeting will be 6 p.m. at Stanley’s Family Restaurant in Kimball. “Fecal exceedance (in the river) is extremely high,” said CRWD administrator Merle Anderson. “And Lake Louisa’s nutrient levels have exceeded state guidelines for years.” The main stem of the Clearwater River showed fecal coliform levels that were 10 times above the state-allowed levels of 200 colonies per 100 milliliters of water. While the exact cause of the contamination has not been determined, numerous farms border that stretch of the river, and CRWD officials suspect runoff from animal feedlots may be causing much of the pollution. “We found fecal coliform everywhere,” said CRWD engineer Norm Wenck. “Some levels were as high as 2,000 colonies per 100 milliliters.” The cause of the high nutrient levels in Lake Louisa is not as clear, but the project will identify the pollution sources. The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, under the Federal Pollution Control Agency’s Clean Water Act, identified the waterways as impaired and in need of help. Due to the great number of MPCA identified impaired waters, the local waters were not scheduled for MPCA attention until 2005 or 2006. “We volunteered to look at it earlier,” Wenck said. The first meeting will be a fact-finding mission. The CRWD board invited other area water monitoring agencies and officials to the meeting, such as the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources and the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, plus local organizations. “First we need to compile existing data,” Anderson said. “We will combine our data and the data of other agencies to see what we need to do next.” The next step may include more monitoring to determine specific causes of the pollution, or the existing data could be used to prepare a report that would be used to seek funding to fix the problems. “This first meeting will help us identify our partners who will work with us to assist property owners,” Anderson said. Wednesday’s meeting will target other agencies, and future meetings are planned to get property owners’ input.
