Though it has taken much longer than originally anticipated, an effort to remove a hyacinth bloom from Crest Lake, one of the smallest lakes in the LSU lakes system, is finally underway and making significant progress.
So far, an estimated 65% of the lake has been cleared of the hyacinths—a marked contrast to the situation just a couple of weeks ago, when the Dalrymple Drive lake was completely overgrown with the pesky, floating plants.
The machine and manpower doing the bulk of the work is being made available by the Bayou Lafourche Fresh Water District, which agreed in June to contract with LSU—technically the lake’s owner—to remove the plants.
The Lakeshore Civic Association and The University Lake Improvement and Preservation Association, or TULIPA, put up the $5,000 to rent the equipment from the Lafourche water district. LSU constructed a ramp into the lake to enable the equipment to access the water and is also providing a front-end loader and dump trucks to haul the harvested plants away.
Since early May, Lakeshore resident Matt Thomas and a handful of volunteers have been trying to rid the lake of the plants, which do not pose a hazard while alive to the ecosystem but instead rob of the water of crucial oxygen once they die and rot. Though Thomas’ grassroots cleanup effort put a small dent in the problem, the plants were too much for his limited manpower so he began reaching out to state and local government to try to find a solution.
Drawing up the contract between a parish agency—the water district—and the state, via LSU, is one of the main reasons the cleanup process has taken so long, Thomas says. Daily thunderstorms have also hampered progress, though the winds associated with the storms have inadvertently helped the effort by pushing the plants closer toward the shore.
Thomas says he never expected the process to drag on for months, but he is optimistic there is finally a light at the end of the tunnel.
“The good thing is now that this boat ramp has been built the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries can get their boat into this lake,” he says. “So when springtime comes they can take advantage of that and spray and monitor it closely so hopefully this will not happen again.”
—Stephanie Riegel
