Lake Pepin Island Project: In the fight to save the lake

(AP) – Scenic views of Lake Pepin – at first glance everything looks ideal until reality hits and the fishing boat we are in goes aground.

“I would say we're a foot away, maybe a little less,” said Nick Chyko, a civil engineer with the Brennan Company.

What's the problem?

In barely a foot of water and with a strict path off the coast of Bay City, Chyko's engine spends most of its journey scouring the lake bottom to give us a closer look at these islands being built by the Brennan Company. This project, commissioned by the US Army Corps of Engineers, was decades in the making. Sediments are dredged to allow deeper channel passages and are then deposited a few hundred meters away, where they are formed into islands.

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

“It's sometimes difficult to grasp the magnitude of this project because it has taken so many years and so many partners,” said Ryle Hince, executive director of the Lake Pepin Legacy Alliance.

background

Hince is committed to protecting this naturally widening section of the Mississippi from disappearing, from Bay City to the town of Pepin on the Wisconsin side and Red Wing to Wabasha on the Minnesota side. Lake Pepin extended as far south as St. Paul 12,000 years ago, but with about a million tons of sediment settling at the mouth of the lake each year, Pepin is on track to fill within just over 300 years.

“If this project didn’t happen and we just let it fill in, this community would essentially no longer have access to the lake, especially by boat. You could maybe go out in the kayak a little longer, but that's enough.” “And what you see is that everything that is water now would eventually just be sand, which would then be filled with all sorts of vegetation,” says Hince. “To just have it disappear so quickly and become a completely different ecosystem — that’s a loss that doesn’t have to happen.”

Planning and fundraising began more than a decade ago, with a focus on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' need to maintain a 9-foot shipping channel through Lake Pepin and the upper Mississippi River. This was ultimately selected as one of only ten sites in the country to fund a pilot program to offset the costs of transporting dredged material. While the total cost between federal and local contributions is about $50 million, keeping the dredged material relatively close together and forming it into islands is actually the cheaper option compared to shipping tons of material elsewhere.

“What they're dredging up here in the canal is a lot of fine material, and they don't have anywhere to put it,” Hince said. “They require a two-year temporary location in deep water before they can find their permanent home – a win-win situation for canal maintenance.”

What's next?

Right now, many – including conservationists, duck hunters and fishermen – are trying to be patient. This project will not prevent the lake from filling, but it will create a major access channel from the public launch and a lifeline to Bay City.

“This year it's probably the lowest I've ever seen it, and then the duck is out and it's getting worse and worse every year,” says a local duck hunter. “A lot of birds just don't move.” They find a place to perch and then don't want to go anywhere because once they get upstream there's no vegetation left to feed on.

Completion is scheduled for 2027, and other lakefront communities along the upper Mississippi are taking notes.

“There is so much economic activity on the river in the form of barge traffic and things like that, but the navigable portion of the river is not on the Lake City side, but toward the Wisconsin side,” says Katie Hmanga of the Lake City Historical Society. “There will always be a navigable channel through what is now Lake Pepin, but that doesn't necessarily mean we have a lot of navigable water here on the Minnesota side unless we can adopt the engineering but also slow down this problem.”

For this reason, further projects are being planned.

“Now it’s just a matter of what kind of useful projects do you want to do? And how can we help connect them with the right people and ensure that all of the community's voices are heard and have the chance to show what could be possible?” says Hince.