Lake Pepin island project: Inside the fight to save the lake

(AP) - Picturesque views of Lake Pepin – at first glance, everything looks ideal until reality hits, and the fishing boat we are in hits bottom.

"I would say we’re in a foot, maybe a little bit less," says Nick Chyko, a civil engineer with Brennan Company.

What's the problem?

In barely a foot of water and with a strict path to follow off the shore of Bay City, Chyko’s motor chews up the lake bed nearly the entire ride to give us a closer look at these islands being constructed by Brennan Company. Contracted by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, this project has been decades in the making. Sediment is being dredged up to allow for deeper channel passes and is then deposited a few hundred yards away, where it’s being formed into islands.

"All three islands will be done, or at least the granular portion of them," says Chyko.

"Sometimes it's hard to capture the magnitude of this project because it's been so many years and so many partners," says Ryle Hince, executive director of the Lake Pepin Legacy Alliance.

Background

Hince is committed to saving this naturally widening stretch of the Mississippi River from disappearing, roughly between Bay City down to the town of Pepin on the Wisconsin side, and Red Wing to Wabasha on the Minnesota side. Lake Pepin used to extend all the way up to St. Paul 12,000 years ago, but with about a million tons of sediment settling at the lake's mouth annually, Pepin is on pace to fill in within just over 300 years.

"If this project wasn't happening and we just let it fill in, this community would essentially have no access to the lake anymore, certainly not by boat. You could maybe get a kayak out for a little bit longer, but that'll probably be gone, too. And what you see is that everything that's water right now would eventually just be sand, then it would fill in with whatever vegetation," says Hince. "Letting it just disappear so quickly and become an entirely different ecosystem—it's a loss that doesn't have to happen."

More than a decade ago, planning and fundraising began, focusing on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' need to maintain a nine-foot navigation channel through Lake Pepin and the upper Mississippi River. This was eventually selected as one of only ten sites in the nation for pilot program funding to offset the cost of transporting dredged material. While the entire price tag is roughly $50 million between federal and local contributions, keeping the dredged material relatively close and forming it into islands is actually the cheaper option compared to transporting tons of material elsewhere.

"What they're dredging in the channel here is a lot of fine material, and they don't have anywhere to put that," says Hince. "They need a two-year temporary placement site for it in deep water before they can find its final home. It's very expensive. There just isn't the physical capacity to store that material. So, if they can do this, it's kind of a win-win for channel maintenance."

What's next?

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

"This year's probably the lowest I’ve ever seen it, and then the duck out and it's just been getting worse and worse every year, says a local duck hunter.  "A lot of the birds just aren't moving. They'll find one spot to set and then they don’t want to go anywhere because once they come upriver, there’s no vegetation for them to feed on."

Scheduled for completion in 2027, other lakeshore communities along the upper Mississippi are taking notes.

"There’s so much economic activity on the river in terms of barge traffic and that sort of thing, but the navigable part of the river is not on the Lake City side; it’s over toward Wisconsin," says Katie Hmanga with the Lake City Historical Society. "There will always be a navigable channel through what is now Lake Pepin, but it’s not necessarily going to mean that we have a lot of navigable water here on the Minnesota side unless we can do the engineering but also slow this problem down."

For that reason, more projects are on the horizon.

"Now it’s just, well, what kind of beneficial projects do you want to do? And how can we play a role in connecting them to the right people and making sure all community voices are heard and have a chance to demonstrate what could be possible?" says Hince.