The Lake Pepin Island Project: Inside the Fight to Save the Lake

(AP) – The picturesque scenery of Lake Pepin – at first glance everything looks perfect until it is faced with reality fisher we are in the last indicators.

“I’d say we’re in a foot, maybe a little less,” says Nick Chico, a structural engineer with Brennan.

what is the problem

In barely a foot of water and with a clear route to follow from the Bay City shore, the Chyko motor chews up the lake bed for most of the trip so we can get a closer look at these islands that Brennan is building. This project, contracted by the US Army Corps of Engineers, was decades in the making. The silt is dredged to allow for deeper channel passages and then deposited several hundred yards away where it forms islands.

“All three islands will be ready, or at least the granular part of them,” says Chico.

“Sometimes it’s hard to grasp the magnitude of this project because it’s been so many years and so many partners,” said Ryle Hines, executive director of the Lake Pepin Legacy Alliance.

Background

Hines is committed to saving this naturally widening stretch of the Mississippi River, roughly from Bay City to Pepin on the Wisconsin side and Red Wing to the Wabashi on the Minnesota side, from extinction. Lake Pepin extended all the way to St. Paul 12,000 years ago, but with about a million tons of sediment deposited near the lake’s mouth each year, Pepin is set to fill in just over 300 years.

“If this project didn’t happen and we just let it fill up, this community would effectively no longer have access to the lake, especially not by boat. Maybe you could take the kayak a little longer, but that’s probably going to go away, too, and you see whatever is water now will eventually just be sand, and then it’s going to fill in with all kinds of vegetation,” Hines says. “To let it just disappear so quickly and turn into a completely different ecosystem is a loss that shouldn’t happen.”

More than a decade ago, planning and fundraising began, focusing on the need for the US Army Corps of Engineers to maintain a nine-foot navigation channel across Lake Pepin and the upper Mississippi River. It was eventually selected as one of ten locations in the country for pilot funding to offset the cost of transporting the mined material. While the total price tag is about $50 million between federal and local contributions, keeping the mined material relatively close and forming it into islands is actually a cheaper option compared to shipping tons of material elsewhere.

“What they’re digging up in the canal here is a lot of great material, and they don’t have a place to put it,” says Gines. “They need a two-year place to temporarily put this stuff in deep water before they can find it a final home. It is very expensive. There is simply no physical capacity to store this material. So if they can do that, that’s good. a win-win for supporting the channel.”

what’s next

For now, many, including conservationists, duck hunters and fishermen, are trying to be patient. This project will not stop the lake from filling, but it will provide a large access channel from the public boat and a lifeline to Bay City.

“This year is probably the lowest I’ve ever seen it, and then the duck came out, and every year it gets worse and worse,” says a local duck hunter. – Many birds simply do not move. They’ll find one place to park and then they won’t want to go anywhere because once they go upstream there’s no vegetation to feed on.”

Completion is scheduled for 2027, with other lakefront communities along the upper Mississippi taking note.

“There is so much economic activity on the river in terms of barge traffic and things like that, but the navigable part of the river is not on the Lake City side; it goes toward Wisconsin,” says Kathy Hmanga of the Lake City Historical Society. . “There’s always going to be a navigable channel through what is now Lake Pepin, but that’s not necessarily going to mean we’re going to have a lot of navigable water here on the Minnesota side unless we can get the engineering done, but also slow that down.”

For this reason, more projects appear on the horizon.

“Now it’s just, okay, what useful projects do you want to do? And how can we play a role in connecting them with the right people and making sure that all the voices of the community are heard and have a chance to demonstrate what’s possible?” says Hines.