DEP Destruction of China Lake Understood

http://kennebecjournal.mainetoday.com/view/letters/5819684.html

Today's Top Headlines
from the Kennebec Journal
1/15/08

I have lived on or beside China Lake since the 1930s. The lake was once clear. Now with the water to your knees you barely see your feet.

Roger Wheeler, president of Friends of Sebago Lake, is 100 percent correct stating, "the catastrophic water quality (of China Lake) collapse happened soon after natural water level fluctuations were replaced by rigid constant high levels. It is the state's refusal to work with nature to please special interests that is 'incorrect.'"

Is it the China Lake Association and Dana Murch of the Department of Environmental Protection that we have to "thank" for flooded China Lake?

Their track record of drowned, destroyed emergent swamps, miles and miles of eroded shoreline, and decades of murky water all speak for themselves.

China Lake was once clear and spring fed and ringed by natural stone and gravel shores. Now it is flooded into raw soil and live trees and has been since the 1970s when the mismanagement began.

For the tens of thousands who use or drink the Kennebec Water District's supply, I felt you deserve to know.

Henry Dillenbeck

Winslow