Volunteer group fighting sedimentation
By CLEON RICKEL, Herald Senior Writer
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Water. It's essential to all of us. But pollution and limited resources threaten our water supplies, and a confusing web of entities controls who gets water and how much. The Herald's exclusive, six-part series examines important water issues facing Franklin County.
Silting and sedimentation filling up the area's lakes will become one of the hottest issues facing eastern Kansas in the future.
One volunteer group, the Hillsdale Water Quality Project, has sought to defuse the issue at Hillsdale Lake and has become a national model for its efforts.
When it was filled in 1982, Hillsdale Lake's life expectancy was rated at 100 years.
But within 10 years, the 4,600-acre lake had received so much sediment and pollutants, it had "aged" by 25 years, Gale Garber, executive director of the Hillsdale Water Quality Project, said.
Besides being one of the state's most popular lakes -- 1.6 million people visit it each year -- Hillsdale Lake is a major source of drinking water for some of the fastest-growing areas and communities in the state.
Alarmed, a group of people living around the lake and communities in the watershed with the assistance of the quasi-federal Lake Region Resource Conservation and Development Council, teamed up to tackle the problem.
At a time when water quality issues pitted communities, residents, recreational sportsmen and farmers against each other, those groups joined the Hillsdale effort enthusiastically, Garber said.
The program has been a success because everyone agreed that action needed to be taken, she said.
Volunteers monitor the lake and the streams entering it, take part in cleanups and pollution prevention program and spread the word, she said.
The Hillsdale group, which was established as a nonprofit corporation based at New Century, has won national awards for its efforts and has been copied by groups in other watersheds, she said.
The group has picked up a variety of state and federal grants, as well as contributions from individuals and groups in the watershed, she said.
Ironically, because of the success of the program, grants are being sent to other watersheds to groups seeking to replicate the Hillsdale efforts.
The Hillsdale group also has been hired by the Lake Region RC&D and the Marais des Cygnes River Basin Advisory Group in hopes of replicating the same success throughout the entire river basin.
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