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Three Mill Creek Park lakes closed
and Brandon Klein
YOUNGSTOWN
The executive director of Mill Creek MetroParks expressed frustration that more can’t be done sooner to stop city sewage from polluting the park’s lakes.
“We should not be asked to wait another 20 years,” Aaron Young said at a news conference late Friday speaking about the city’s plan to make needed treatment-plant improvements by the end of 2033.
In response to test results from the Mahoning County District Board of Health lab, which showed high E-coli bacteria levels in Lake Newport water samples, Mill Creek MetroParks closed Lakes Newport, Cohasset and Glacier on Friday for public use until further notice.
The health board took seven water samples Thursday from throughout Lake Newport, after a massive fish kill in that lake due to a city sewer overflow, and reported the results late Friday after a 24-hour incubation period in the Austintown lab.
E-coli are bacteria found in the feces of humans and other warm-blooded animals.
Three BOH members on the phone and one in the board office convened in a special meeting Friday afternoon and unanimously recommended park officials bar all recreational use of the lakes, said County Health Commissioner Patricia Sweeney.
To protect public health, the BOH recommended such use “should cease until further testing” is conducted, Sweeney said.
In the seven samples, E-coli counts per 100 milliliters of lake water ranged from 388 to 1200, Sweeney reported.
One hundred milliliters is about 3.4 ounces.
Five of the seven samples exceeded 576, the level above which the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency says a potential public health risk exists, Sweeney reported.
“In the interest of protecting MetroParks patrons’ health, safety and well-being, we believe this is the appropriate course of action,” Young said.
At a news conference Friday night, Young said the parks rely heavily on the regulatory agencies, and he was frustrated with the time it was taking by the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency to test samples from the lakes.
“We are being as proactive as we can, based on the information at hand,” he said.
U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan of Howland, D-13th, was unavailable to comment late Friday, but a spokesman said they were in conversations with all involved parties and will do everything in the congressman’s power to rectify the situation.
Earlier this week, Mayor John A. McNally said the city health officials reported the lakes posed no harm to the waterways aside from not eating the fish.
But McNally said Friday night the earlier comments were made based on earlier testing done.
Though the city’s wastewater treatment officials do daily testing of the lakes, the OEPA and county health officials have taken the lead.
An agreement between the city and OEPA and the federal EPA calls for “substantial completion” by the end of 2033 of $146 million in improvements over 20 years to its wastewater system, including a $48 million effort to upgrade the city’s sewer system to avoid sewage discharges into the creek and the park lakes along it.
The lake closures do not change the schedule for the project’s completion with residents paying for the improvements with sewer fees.
“[The wastwater treatment improvement plan] is fair based on sewer rate increases that we think are affordable,” the mayor said.
The original agreement asked the city to complete the improvements within a 12-year-period, which would increase rates by 9 percent to 10 percent per year.
McNally said users could not afford those increases within that time span.
McNally said they also had conversations with the federal EPA on seeking financial assistance but to no avail.
“There’s no free money out here,” McNally said.
But Young said the problem needs to be resolved more quickly.
“We need to identify when those funds would be available,” he said, but added that he was “sympathetic” to city’s plight.
All scheduled activities for the three Mill Creek Park lakes are canceled until further notice, park officials said. No fishing, boating or other recreational use of those lakes is permitted.
Those who have registered for upcoming park-sponsored water programs or activities were urged to contact the park’s Ford Nature Center.
The initial pollution incident report concerning the fish kill in Lake Newport came June 29 from Kurt Kollar, an Ohio EPA on-scene coordinator.
Kollar said his agency was notified of the problem by a state wildlife officer, who reported “a vast number of larger-sized dead fish in the lake,” which appeared to have been “dead for two days based on decomposition.”
Because the kill affected primarily larger fish, Kollar said he suspected a sewage discharge that had depleted the dissolved oxygen required for fish survival, rather than a chemical or oil-field waste spill.