Anchorage, Alaska features a number of municipal parks
with freshwater lakes. Every year in May,
once the winter snow has receded, a city-wide cleanup removes the litter
detritus of winter along the streets and trails. Later that month the annual Creek Cleanup
does the same for the city’s urban streams.
No equivalent organized effort exists for the lakes.
In May 2009, at the behest of the Municipal Parks and
Recreation Department, Jerry and Lisa Vandergriff organized a handful of divers
to remove debris from DeLong Lake near Anchorage International Airport. The dive was an effort to show that the
problem of litter in the environment did not end at water’s edge.
On Sunday, May 10, 2009, Mother’s Day, the divers assembled
on the dock at DeLong Lake at 9 am. (The dock's location is indicated by the star on the map.) The
winter ice had recently cleared from the 20 acre lake surface, but the water would
still be a chilly 45 degrees F. The poor
visibility at the bottom of the lake, 0 to 5 feet, meant that only very
experienced divers were taking part in this “muck dive.” We donned our drysuits
and tanks, grabbed our mesh goody bags to bring up whatever we found that did
not belong on the bottom and entered the water.
Each diver attempted to swim in a different direction
following a compass heading to cover as much as the lake as possible. I dropped to the bottom and started swimming
vaguely aware of a nearby diver on a divergent course.
The bottom was covered in a layer of decaying organic
matter from leaves and tree limbs. I
stuck my hand in the layer and was up to my elbow in the muck without finding a
hard bottom. I did not find this
surprising as they are the same conditions I encountered at the nearby Little
Campbell Lake. Hovering just above the
layer, I swam along a compass course as a reference in the low horizontal
visibility.
I came across scattered piles of beer cans, bottles, and
other debris. The sites seemed to be
randomly scattered with no discernable pattern.
I placed the debris and my mesh bag and moved along. Upon using half my air supply, I turned to
the left, swam about 25 feet and swam a reverse compass course inbound toward
the dock. The entire dive lasted about
45 minutes with a maximum depth of 16 feet.
The deepest part of the lake is reported to be about 22 feet.
Back on the dock, I emptied a half-full goody bag,
separating the mostly recyclable aluminum from the disposable trash. Jerry explained that the scattered piles of
beer cans most likely marked the sites of ice fishing huts set up on the lake
during the winter. The fishermen
disposed of their cans down the hole.
While I did see river otter and muskrat around the lake,
I had no encounters underwater. Of course,
with the barely-able-to-see-your-hand-in-front-of-your-face visibility, the
critters could have been putting on an underwater show nearby and I would not
have seen it. Nor did I see any of the
fish that are stocked in the lake which include arctic char, salmon, and trout.
I have participated in a couple of water body cleanups
over the years. DeLong Lake is probably
one of the more challenging ones.
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