Rapidan Dam failure still harms the Blue Earth River while most other Minnesota waters improve
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All it takes is a bucketful of water, a clear tube and some sunlight for Eileen Campbell to conduct a water quality test.
Campbell, who works for the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, is about 10 miles south of the Rapidan Dam, where a partial failure last summer churned up more than a century’s worth of sediment and pollutants that had been cemented in the river bottom and sent it downstream.
She stands on the Country Road 33 bridge, tosses a bucket into the Blue Earth River below, scoops up the cloudy water, pours it into the Secchi tube — which tests for water quality — and holds it up against the sunlight.
It shows exactly what Campbell thought it would.
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“We’re still seeing the effects of the partial breach of the Rapidan Dam on our water quality in the Blue Earth river today,” Campbell said. “So all of this sediment that you see here, it's not generally here.”
“Generally, we see it a lot clearer this time of year,” she added.
Minnesota’s rivers and lakes are slowly getting healthier, according to the latest water quality report by the state's Pollution Control Agency, but the pollution still threatens many of the state’s waterways. Campbell says the Blue Earth River is one that is hurting and is in need of intensive care.
The water today is vastly improved from the first dark mud-filled samples she pulled from the river two days after floodwaters breached the Rapidan Dam and carved a large path around it, Campbell said. But the sediment still continues to affect the clarity and quality of the Blue Earth River.
And the river isn’t the same anymore. The Blue Earth River used to be characterized along its sides and riverbed by gravel, cobble, boulders and riffles. But silt buried much of it.
The dam’s failure sent more than 12 million cubic yards of sediment downstream. That’s enough muck to fill more than 600 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
Campbell says the river sludge filled in the deeper pools, holes and contours of the river bottom that many fish made home, and the deluge of stirred-up pollutants helped choke the life out of fish habitats, killing many of them.
“If the river is so turbid that good plants can’t grow, then we lose that habitat,” Campbell said. “And then if you lose that habitat, then you lose the stuff the fish eats, and you lose the fish. They don’t have clean substrate to lay their eggs on. It might get covered up or smothered from sediment that’s coming downstream.
”It’s probably decimated that population," Campbell added. “We just lose those really cool, great populations of fish and other critters that we want to see in our rivers.”
With its cloudy water, high bacteria levels, sediment pollution and manure runoff, the Blue Earth River falls far short of meeting state standards for aquatic life and recreation. It’s one of more than 5,000 Minnesota lakes, rivers and streams on the state’s impaired waters list.
Water can heal, but it takes time
There are signs that Minnesota’s waters are slowly getting healthier. According to the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency’s water quality report, fish and insect populations have increased in some rivers and streams. Phosphorous levels are also stabilizing in most regions of the state.
Nearly one hundred lakes and river segments have been removed from the impaired waters list in recent years, according to Kim Laing, surface water monitoring manager for the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency.
“It takes a lot of effort to reduce the pollutants that are impacting those water bodies,” Laing said. “On average, it took 20 years for that resource to be improved upon, for it to come off the impaired waters list.”
Laing credits that process to efforts to reduce manure and other farm runoff, the restoration of wetlands and buffer zones that absorb polluted runoff, and other water and land management practices for helping incrementally improve river and lake water quality around the state. And she said waterways will naturally try to heal themselves, but it does take time and requires ongoing work.
“We need to keep going,” Laing said. “We’re seeing there has been change because people have been doing that. We have a long ways to go.”
And the MPCA’s Eileen Campbell says the Blue Earth River will eventually heal too, although it may take decades to get there.
“Rivers change over time; they naturally want to get back to an equilibrium state, and this sediment is going to move through,” Campbell said. “I do feel that the Blue Earth River will get back to where it was before.”
