The state Department of Environmental Conservation has issued its most recent report detailing water quality levels on the Kenai River.
The Kenai is one of a number of rivers now listed as impaired in a state catalog.
A change in how the Kenai river is listedis the big story here. And turbidity is the main word.
“It’s the ability of particulates to basically cloud water, or to prevent light from penetrating it," says Jack Sinclair, executive director of the Kenai Watershed Forum. Few organizations have done as much research on the Central Peninsula’s most famous river as it has.
“It could be consisting of organic matter, silt, sands, all kinds of different materials that are involved in making that happen so that light can’t penetrate. The more turbid, the more cloudy, the less organisms can see, like fish. It also creates siltation on the bottom of the river, too and a lack of ability for invertebrates to function very well if it’s too cloudy.”
That the Kenai River is turbid isn’t new. Much of that is natural. Both the tidal influence on the river, which is in play for the first several miles and its glacial feedstock mean it’s always going to have some turbidity.
The DEC report and new classification open the door for addressing what human causes are contributing to the turbidity issue. Look for a lot of talk in near future about how many and what kind of boats are appropriate for the Kenai. That’s been a kind of sideline debate for years, after the various user groups finish talking about allocation.
Sinclair says one-of-a-kind studies about boating have already been done here, and led to positive changes.
“What kind of boats should we be using? Back in the late 90’s, we started talking about boat wakes and boat wake studies. That’s where the first boat wake studies were done and really that was primarily about what can we do to reduce the impact of powerboats out on the river. That was all groundbreaking, national-level studies done by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the University of Mississippi. So we know what kind of impacts are out there from these power boats. Now we need to find out what more can we implement.”
The goal, of course, is to get the river off the state’s list of impaired water bodies. There are a number of ways to get a category five body of water off that list. New and better data that show water quality standards are being met, or a demonstration that the methods used to classify it as impaired were wrong. Or developing a recovery plan and putting mitigation measures in place that bring water quality standards where they need to be.
According to the DEC report, that means reigning in the use of power boats in an 11 mile stretch of the lower river. Sinclair says the problem is more nuanced than just too many boats going too fast. Location and timing play a role. The type of hull on the boats makes a difference. As the discussion moves ahead, changing boat types might not be a popular move, but the draft and volume of those boats might be a starting point.
“They might want to talk about how heavy we can weigh these boats down. We know that if a heavier boat is out there, plowing through the water, that actually is generating a tremendous amount more wake and power that’s hitting the sides of the river (bank). A lightly loaded, flat bottom boat really generates the least amount of wake from a power boat out there. And then the opposite is true for a V-bottom, heavily loaded boat. So, are we going to be talking about limiting the number of boats? How can we address the type of boat that goes out there?”
Those are big questions, and they’ll undoubtedly get lots of debate and discussion as the various user groups and government and non-governmental agencies kick around ideas for how to get the Kenai river back in shape and keep it there.