Pa. environmental officials visit Carsonia Park to see Antetiam Valley planned watershed upgrades

While growing up in Stony Creek Mills in the 1970s, Joseph Boyle and his friends loved to go to Carsonia Park a stone’s throw away in Pennside to go ice skating.

These days, the surface of the spring-fed Crystal Lake doesn’t freeze over because the water is so warm, with temperatures in the upper 80s in the summertime, he said.

Frequent severe rainfall such as the July 9 deluge have deposited huge amounts of sediment in the lake. Canada geese that stick around all year deposit their excrement, causing algae to flourish and fish to die.

“It’s supposed to be a ‘Crystal Lake’ not an ‘Emerald Green Lake,’” said Boyle, vice chairman of the Mount Penn Borough Municipal Authority and chairman of the source-water protection committee.

The 27-acre property in Lower Alsace and Exeter townships is owned by the Mount Penn Borough Municipal Authority, which harnesses water from beneath the lake and park to supply about 30,000 households in Mount Penn, St. Lawrence, Lower Alsace and part of Exeter.

The authority has a plan set to begin this summer to mitigate those problems. The plan involves constructing diversion vaults to catch storm water and redirect through wetlands that will be built on one end of the lake, Dave Coyne of Liberty Environmental explained.

Coyne just completed a request-for-proposal for contractors for the project.

The water will cool as it filters through cattails and other natural plants, and there will be less sediment going into the lake, Boyle said.

Ahead of that work, about volunteers Friday heeded the call for help in clearing clear brush and leaf debris from the lake shore.

“I think it’s important we all contribute to keep our community a nice place we can all enjoy,” said one of the volunteers, Corinne Hauk, who graduated from Antietam High School in 2004 and is raising her own children in the Antietam Valley. “I feel it’s also important to set up the environment for success.”

While restoring the lake to its former luster may be a goal, it’s really an outcome of a watershed management plan that has as its primary objective protecting the source water supply, Boyle told a group of state environmental officials Friday during a walking meeting around the park.

“Last summer we had one of our wells that was literally a foot away from getting breached,” Boyle “Rains we have been getting are more than just rains–they’re floods.”

The flooding over the past two or three years is an exacerbation of a problem that has gone on for 45 years, Boyle explained, Following Tropical Storm Agnes, engineers redirected stormwater and as a result much of its end up in Crystal Lake.

The July 9 flood that caused millions of dollars in damage to the Antietam Middle-Senior High School building, which has yet to reopen, has altered the sedimentation in the entire Antietam watershed, Boyle explained. As a result, the Antietam Valley swimming pool just uphill from the lake is also frequently inundated.

Boyle said the authority will have spent about $600,000 on damage from last summer’s flood, including replacing a couple of storm mains that were washed away last summer’s flood. It’s an unbudgeted expense for which it received no disaster funding from the federal or state governments, he said.

The plan for the lake rehabilitation is itself underfunded, Boyle siad, adding that a Growing Greener grant application was denied for reasons he’s unclear.

Boyle said he hoped that by getting Department of Environmental Protection officials to put boots on the ground he would be able to make the case for the positive environmental, educational and economic impacts of the project and direct him to funding opportunities.