Dredging Deepens, But Doesn’t Restore

You Can’t Dig Your Way to A Healthy Lake…

• Dredging can deepen a lake but does nothing for water quality, nothing for algae, little to reduce odor and nothing to prevent fish kills or improve fish health and growth.
• Dredging ‘digs up’ PCBs and other toxins that have been buried for decades in lake sediment.
• Dredging re-mixes phosphorus, nitrogen, and other harmful pollutants back into the water column.
• Dredging projects are typically so prohibitively expensive and difficult to permit. Often many years and many thousands of dollars are spent on feasibility studies that lead nowhere.

The biggest problem with dredging is that it doesn’t resolve nutrient overloading. In fact, it makes it worse because the act of dredging releases sediment laden pollutants, chemicals, PCBs, phosphates, and nitrates back into the lake’s water column. This is why dredging is such a highly regulated activity and why it is becoming more and more difficult to obtain permits for dredging projects.

As those “dug up” pollutants and nutrients get re-released back into the water column, they fuel the next round of weed and algae growth. As this new round of weed and algae growth die and sink to the bottom of the lake, layers of dead organic muck accumulate all over again. The downward cycle of nutrient overloading continues.

Many lake engineering firms advocate dredging as the “only available solution” to an impaired lake. Often these firms will charge many thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars for the required “feasibility studies” knowing full-well that there may be little chance of the project receiving permit approval upon completion of the study.

The simple fact is that dredging will not restore the ecosystem, will not fix the problem of nutrient overloading, and wastes thousands and thousands of dollars that should be used to restore the lake – not make it worse.

Nature has a Better Way

Fortunately, there is an effecitive and affordable approach for removing the nutrient-rich muck at the lake-bottom without the need for dredging.  Lake Savers Four Step Lake Renewal Process has been scientifically proven to eliminate lake-bottom muck without dredging.  Reductions of one foot per year are typical.  Best of all, our process works continuously to break the cycle of nutrient overloading that is the root cause of muck, weeds and algae.

Visit our Success Stories page to see our Lake Renewal Process in action.

Photo credit: Mark Faviell Photos / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND