Advocates Team With Scientists To Test Lake Waterford

Posted

Members of the Magothy River Association collaborated with the University of Maryland scientists in late October to collect sediment samples from locations throughout Lake Waterford.

Magothy River Association President Paul Spadaro coordinated with Jeremy Testa, an associate professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science at the Chesapeake Biological Laboratory in Solomons, for the collection and testing assistance.

“Paul got in touch because I'm an estuarine scientist that does a lot of work in the Chesapeake Bay and spend a lot of my time trying to understand what happens in the sediments that underlie the tidal waters,” said Testa, while rinsing off his muddied gear.

“We focus on the sediments because they can be kind of a reservoir for the nutrients that come in from land,” Testa explained. “I think Paul and others’ hypothesis is that the sediments here are really rich. There’s an impoundment here, so material that comes from the land ends up here and sinks down and just gets trapped here.”

Which would contribute to things like low oxygen levels in the water and the proliferation of algae blooms, as Lake Waterford has experienced recently. This testing will provide solid data and help provide a clearer picture of what is going on within the lake.

“We’re doing a very limited amount of sampling just to try to get some preliminary numbers on what those nutrient contents are like and then compare them to sediments in other parts of the bay and in other reservoirs and impoundments,” Testa said.

On a perfect fall afternoon, the team dropped two metal row boats into Lake Waterford and collected samples from 12 locations around the lake using a unique tool Testa aptly refers to as a “pull core.” The long steel pole is designed to reach the bottom of waterways to pull cores of sediment for collection and testing.

“The machinist at CBL built this for us,” explained Testa. Holding a thick, heavy-duty plastic cylinder, he continued, “These go on the end and we literally push it into the sediment, and we have a system here that sets a vacuum so it holds the water and the sediment in this core. We can pull it up to the surface; cap it with one of these rubber stoppers; detach this from the core; and then we take a sample of the top layer of the sediment.”

From here, the sample will be taken to an analytical services laboratory, which will perform technical analysis that involves computing how much carbon, phosphorus and nitrogen are in the sediments.

“What we hope - no matter what these sediments actually show … is that this will inspire the county to come up with a plan on how they’re going to fix it or restore it,” Spadaro said.

“If these sediments show that they’re suspect - that would make the decision easier,” Spadaro remarked. “We will talk to the county council and try to get this on the fast track.”

The goal is to have results and potential recommendations sooner rather than later. From there, the information and any decisions will be up to the county leaders.

“We’ll get these into the lab, and hopefully some time before the end of the year, we’ll have the numbers back,” Spadaro said.

Comments

No comments on this item Please log in to comment by clicking here