Making Waves

A Chinook-salmon spotting in Lake Ballinger represents more than dinner to those living along its banks.

Members of the Lake Ballinger Community Association see silvery scales in the murky depths of the 107-acre lake skirted to the south by 205th Street and to the west by 74th Avenue W. as a promise of a cleaner and safer body of water for everyone.

Founded in 1923, the association was re-energized last March by lakefront dwellers concerned about water quality and flooding issues.

President Jerry Thorsen, who has lived on the banks of Lake Ballinger for nearly 30 years, remembers when the algae-clogged water was so polluted it couldn’t sustain life. That’s something he and his neighbors never want to see again.

About 25 people from 49 waterfront households on the lake straddling Mountlake Terrace and Edmonds attend the meetings held at 7 p.m. the fourth Wednesday of the month in the Plaza Room of the Edmonds Library.

The next meeting is May 25, noted Thorson, who added the public — particularly public officials who can lend political muscle and help in finding funding for lake clean-up — is invited.

Lake dwellers decided enough was enough when twice last summer the lake was declared by Snohomish County Health District officials to be unfit for swimming, Thorsen said. Residents, he complained, were not alerted as to the closures.

Concern also arose over the lake level exceeding its maximum of 278.5 feet three times in one month last year, Thorsen noted. Unusually high precipitation coupled with impeded outflow through culverts that are magnets for beavers and debris blockage were the culprits, according to Thorsen.

Rising water covering low-lying lawns, and in some cases, crawl spaces of homes built close to the shore, is not unusual, said those who live there. The last major floods were in the winter of 1996/1997.

A freak combination of heavy snow followed by warm temperatures and copious rain raised the lake level before mitigation could occur, said Mike Shaw, stormwater program manager for Mountlake Terrace, which controls the lake.

The lake level, which was set by a court order in 1942 and reaffirmed in 1982, is adjusted four times a year at the McAleer Creek weir (small dam) on property owned by the Nile Shrine Center.

Lake Ballinger is fed mainly by Halls and Echo lakes and its outflow carried via culverts to Lake Washington.

Although all jurisdictions in the Lake Ballinger Basin (King and Snohomish counties, Mountlake Terrace, Edmonds and Lynnwood) have strengthened stormwater-detention standards, new development continues to add impervious surfaces to the basin every year and that means more water runoff into the lake, explained Shaw. Combined with intense rainfall, Lake Ballinger residents can expect to see rapidly rising lake levels during future storm events, he added.

In 1972 the state Department of Ecology found Lake Ballinger to have the poorest water quality of all the lakes in Puget Sound.

“Lake Ballinger is an urban lake with urban runoff problems,” Shaw wrote in a history of the lake. It is “a microcosm of what’s happening in the region” in terms of being a catch-all for road runoff, pesticide and fertilizer residue and high fecal coliform from pets, wild animals and birds (particularly geese), the water specialist explained.

Cities and counties around the lake have had success in controlling commercial pollution from “easy targets” like developers, according to Shaw. It’s the hundreds of thousands of households in the basin that are not so easy to monitor, he added.

“People want it all: to drive their cars everywhere, build all over and still have clean water,” Shaw said.

The Nile club and golf course, Lake Ballinger’s neighbor to the east, does a good job of protecting lake water from chemical runoff while maintaining the appearance of its grounds, he added.

The community association was at the forefront of fighting the Nile’s move to build lakeside condominiums in the 1980s, an “improvement” that would have been anything but for the lake community, Thorsen said.

Shaw, who said he intends to work closely with the association in solving problems, said these pollution remedies are being pursued:

•Assessing the efficiency of the hypolimnetic piping system through which fresh water flows and raises the oxygen content at the lake bottom.

•Continue addling (coating with oil) geese eggs to inhibit hatching.

•Continue to relocate beavers and remove dam blockage from culverts.

•Keep identifying and stopping illicit discharge into ground water.

•Ramp up efforts to educate property owners, business operators and schoolchildren as to the importance of protecting our water.

The community association plans to continue collecting information on flood and pollution control and work with local jurisdictions to improve life on the lake.

Jerry Thorsen and his neighbors have no intention of revisiting the days when finding fish — let alone dog-paddling grand kids — in Lake Ballinger was out of the question.