While students were away this summer, UConn Facilities was hard at work to remedy some serious problems with Mirror and Swan Lakes, icons of the Storrs campus. This file photo of Mirror Lake gives us the impression that it’s a clear wellspring from nature’s depths, the happy home of a few picturesque water fowl. The pond, located at the main entrance to the Storrs campus, has a history going back to 1922, when it was created out of a “a marshy meadow” that had become “a breeding ground for swarms of mosquitoes.” (See Mark Roy’s 1997 story from the Advance.) Over the years since 1922, however, the lake has slowly been returning to its marshy origins. Covered in algae, it became sodded with everything from water weeds and sand to goose sludge and run-off from the nearby hills. Geese became a particularly nasty problem in the 1990s, when UConn had to remove them because “the lake was dying from an overabundance of excrement.” (Ibid.) Well, they came back again, as did the mosquitoes, and the lake has areas now only a few inches deep. You could see the geese literally walking across it or standing, barely ankle-deep, half way between the bank and the island. The island, by the way, had deteriorated as well. Originally planted with spruce trees by Professor Albert E. Moss of the College of Agriculture in the 1930s, and at one time lit with landscape lighting, it had become by this summer an impenetrable tangle of underbrush and unstable trees.
Clearly, something had to be done to save the Lake and its island before they reverted to the mosquito infested swamp of a hundred years ago. So this summer I asked our wonderful grounds crew to restore the island and consider ways to make the lake healthier and more attractive. Eventually this will mean a major dredging operation, reestablishing the lake to its original depth, and relocating the geese, whose habits are a threat not only to the lake but also to the students, faculty, and children who like to sit along the shoreline. Our goal is to restore the lake to something like its original beauty, so it can once again function as a healthy and eco-friendly part of our campus.
In the short term, we hired All Habitat Services in Madison CT to literally vacuum the sludge from the bottom of Mirror Lake. There’s a great on-line story (with photos) at Mansfield Today written by Brenda Sullivan. Workmen on the barge literally vacuumed the detritus from the lake bottom. It was sucked through a long tube and poured out into a temporary retention pond, where the goo sunk quickly to the bottom, allowing the clean water to drain from the top back into the lake. Here’s a photo of the goo pouring into the catch basin:
Goo entering retention area
Here’s a picture of Dave Roach of All Habitat Services checking the contents:
Dave Roach
And here’s the clean water filtering back out into the lake. You can see the little streams running out of the top of the fence:
Clean water return
And speaking of lakes, you may have noticed that we are also taking steps to repair Swan Lake, which is located in front of the Chemistry building at the intersection of North Eagleville and Glenbrook Roads. The beauty of this lake had nearly been lost in a shroud of overgrown trees and bushes that ran along the shoreline, and the lake itself was slowing disappearing in a forest of invasive phragmites.
Phragmites australis.
Many members of our Facilities crews worked long, hard hours to get the lakes in better shape for returning students. I want to thank them here for their extra effort and good spirit as we tackled a difficult and long-standing problem.
