Wen Baldwin, a volunteer with the National Park service, pulls a non-stick teflon frying pan out of Lake Mead, the reservoir of Hoover Dam. Quagga mussels smothered the pan in a matter of weeks. (Photo by Shawn Allee)
A tiny aquatic pest called the
quagga mussel is invading lakes
and streams across the country.
It’s even clogging up pipes in
some big-city water systems, dams,
and power plants. When environmental
disaster strikes, sometimes people
scratch their heads and ask: how
could this happen? Shawn Allee reports, in the case of
one quagga mussel invasion, people
got plenty of warning:
Transcript
A tiny aquatic pest called the
quagga mussel is invading lakes
and streams across the country.
It’s even clogging up pipes in
some big-city water systems, dams,
and power plants. When environmental
disaster strikes, sometimes people
scratch their heads and ask: how
could this happen? Shawn Allee reports, in the case of
one quagga mussel invasion, people
got plenty of warning:
n 2007, biologists declared that quagga mussels had infested infested Lake Mead just outside
Las Vegas.
But years before that, park staff and volunteers like Wen Baldwin told folks how to avoid the
problem.
Baldwin says some people helped – most people told him to just drop it.
“Oh, it won’t happen to us. That’s the American theory – fire, cancer, whatever. Oh, it
won’t happen to me.”
But it did happen, and here’s how it went down.
Baldwin went to this conference out East where biologists explained how quaggas clog pipes at
water treatment centers and power plants.
“There was a presentation about them and I realized, hey, they could get in here and they
could cost me money, you money, everybody money. They could raise havoc as they have in
the Great Lakes.”
Baldwin got worried.
Quagga mussles hitchhike on boats, and Lake Mead is a boating hot spot.
Baldwin warned people – wash down your boat before you put it in the lake!
“I put on a lot of programs trying to get people on board. Just didn’t work that well.”
Now, quagga mussels are making a mess of Lake Mead – and Web Baldwin can show how.
Baldwin tests how well quagga stick to different material.
We’re on this dock one morning, and he pulls a rope out of the water.
The rope’s covered with shells that look like fingernail-sized clams.
Allee: “I reckon you have to be pretty careful with your hands, there.”
Baldwin: “Boy, they’ll cut you to ribbons. I go home looking like my hands went through a
meat grinder.”
At the end of the rope – he’s tied a skillet.
Baldwin: “They’ll stick to teflon.”
Allee: “They’ll stick to teflon. Your eggs won’t stick to teflon all that well, but quagga
mussels will.”
Baldwin: “They will. And anywhere they attach the glue they use will hasten the
deterioration of the surface they attach to.”
A quagga-coated teflon pan is a shocker – but what does a quagga invasion mean?
Well, for one, if you dock your boat at Lake Mead – you’ve gotta scrape it all the time.
Swimmers wear shoes to protect their feet from quagga-coated rocks.
And quagga are getting costly.
Zegers: “We’ve been monitoring water quality in the lake pretty extensively.”
Roefer: “These are the six locations we collect samples at.”
I’m with Ron Zegers and Peggy Roefer. They’re with the Southern Nevada Water System. It
provides water to Las Vegas and other cities.
They walk me through slides divers took near water intake pipes – deep in Lake Mead.
Roefer: “And this is where our intake is, on Saddle Island. This is actually the inside of the
rock structure you can see the quaggas on the inside of that. Quagga mussels were
approximately two inches thick.”
Zegers and Roefer say they’re trying plenty of things to keep quagga out of the water supply.
The first is the old stand-by: chlorine.
But too much chlorine can make people sick.
Zegers: “More of those disenfection byproducts form, which puts us closer to our
regulatory compliance issues, so we also have to be concerned about that also.”
Roefer: “You know we’re watching the alternative control strategies, the bio-bullets and
pseudo-flourence and those kinds of things.”
Allee: “Sounds like an arms race.”
Roefer: “Yeah, who can get there first. The annual for this is one to four million dollars.”
Allee: “One to four million dollars. You know, you could clean a lot of water if you didn’t
have to deal with these critters.”
Zegers: “That’s correct. Now it’s just an anticipated expenditure that certainly wasn’t
budgeted for when they first appeared, and now it’s just gonna be a way of life.”
And it could become a a way of life for more lakes if we don’t stop quaggas from spreading
around.
For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.