KAPUSH!

A century ago, there wasn't modern plumbing or sewage treatment plants, public health departments,let alone government programs to subsidize their construction. So a group of citizens got together in 1906 and formed the Okoboji Protective Association, perhaps the first conservation organization in the state of Iowa. Their first topic of discussion was sewage disposal and the best method of preventing its contamination of the lakes. The excerpts below are from OPA minutes spanning from 1906 to the 1940s.

"In the early days of the lake as a summer resort primitive methods of sewage and garbage disposal could be employed without serious danger to the campers and cottagers scattered along its shores. Now the lake shores are veritable city of cottage and hotels, and the summer population is increasing from year to year....complaints that the lake waters are being contaminated as a result of primitive methods of disposing of garbage and sewage are becoming increasingly frequent."

"The very thought of sewage entrance into the waters of the lake is abhorrent to the fine sense of property of every right-thinking man."

"We now have a summer population of over 5000, quite a city. (1912)

"Every lake dweller should make sanitation his hobby"

The problem even persisted into the winter months: "People having fishing shacks are admonished to be careful not to deposit excreta on the ice." "Several epidemics of typhoid fever have been reported as the results of wastes from a typhoid patient getting into a water intake after having been deposited on the ice"

Enter the Fisheries Biologists

For decades, hardly any progress was made on the matter. Jurisdictional responsibility was vague, and progress stagnated like untreated sewage. Curiously enough, it was the DNR fisheries biologists who stepped to the fore. Responsible for managing state fisheries, they understood the impact of sewage on fish and lake health. In 1932, the Board of Conservation and the Fish and Game Commission (the predecessor organization to the State Conservation Commission, today the Department of Natural Resources) lead the charge to do SOMETHING about this growing problem. They funded Iowa Lakeside Laboratory to conduct a study of the relationship between sewage pollution and noxious algae blooms that were killing fish, and began promoting the idea of building a treatment plant for the Iowa Great Lakes to protect waters for fisheries. After it was built, they actually administered the plant for its first decade of operation!

Because human habitation was scattered around the entire perimeter of the lakes, not in just one location like a typical town, a novel approach was needed in terms of how to administer and fund such a system. The approach that would be adopted is described in another OPA bulletin excerpt "Mr. Badgerow (OPA board member) is in favor of the creation of an Iowa Great Lakes Commission having the same power that a city council would have over sanitation, public safety, etc" (1927?) This idea that would take yet another decade before the first version of the Iowa Great Lakes Sanitary Sewer District was formed. It was unique because it included representatives from each of the lake shore communities, so its formation had to address not only the elimination of a major source of water pollution but the social, financial and political challenges to organizing such a system. Today, there are only two other such sanitary sewer districts in Iowa that traverse multiple communities, and they were inspired by the IGLSSD. One is located in the Clear Lake area and the other on the Mississippi River.

Constructed over relatively level terrain, the IGLSS includes 63 lift stations, over 100 miles of gravity and pressure sewers, and a 3.8 million gallon per day capacity waster water treatment plant that must fluctuate between serving only about 20,000 people over the winter to over 100,000 people during holidays such as the 4th of July.

KAPUSH! Don't take that sound for granted!

Information sources: Okoboji Protective Association Bulletins, John Parsons: Okoboji Gold; Places of Quiet Beauty: Parks, Preserves and Environmentalism,by Rebecca Conard.