Paul Szmal: FLX Morning continues at 8.15. We've jumped up a total of four degrees in the past few minutes. You wouldn't necessarily know it because we're only at 14. Let's have a conversation with the president of the Seneca Lake Pier Waters Association, Bill Rogge, joins us. Good morning, Bill. How are you today?
Bill Roege: Morning, Paul. Doing great.
Paul Szmal: Wonderful. Let's start off by talking about the new Association Director, Ben Kline. He started just after, I think, or just before we had a conversation last month.
Bill Roege: Yeah, it was just after. He started on the 3rd of November and he comes to us from Elmira, working on the TV station there, but we're really glad to have him aboard. So he's been been with us one month now and so we've been giving him the fire hose treatment and so he's he's spinning up pretty fast. So we're really, really, really pleased to have him.
Paul Szmal: So he was able to jump in to the deep end of the pool headfirst and be fine?
Bill Roege: Well, we'll see if he comes up on the other side. One of the things we've given him that I wanted to talk about is the hemlock willy adelgid. I think you've probably had it mentioned before, but we're in the middle of a treatment period or we're just finishing up a treatment period that was provided by a private foundation and so Ben now is in charge of getting some real money. There's grants out there from the state on invasive species and it's due in the middle of December. So he's he's been tasked with leading our effort to try to get a super grant application so that we can get the funding we need to actually finish off the the treatments that we want to do over the next couple of years.
Paul Szmal: Yeah, if you've never heard of the hemlock willy adelgid, it's a Asian insect, right?
Bill Roege: Right. So hemlocks are critical trees all across North America and I guess the world, but they came invasive in the South I think about three decades ago and as the climate's been warming up they've moved further and further north so they've been here in New York now for about 10 years and so public lands have been treated right along. So the State Park and Watkins Glen or the National Forest, their hemlocks been treated, but our program is aimed at private land owners which constitute obviously a lot larger portion of the watershed than the public lands do.
Paul Szmal: Right. What's involved with the treatment plan? How does it work?
Bill Roege: Well, we have qualified foresters and actually there are people like that around and they go out with backpacks and they go way up into the ravines and normally they use what's called a basal bark treatment. They spray all around the trunk about chest high and that's as long as they can be far enough away from a stream. If they're near a stream they have to actually drill a hole and put a little like an IV if you will into the tree so that's obviously a bit more involved and expensive.
Paul Szmal: Yeah, that could be a delicate operation too.
Bill Roege: Yeah, well you want to save the tree.
Paul Szmal: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. We're talking with Bill Rogge from the Seneca Lake Pier Wanderers Association here on FLX morning. One of the things that is also in process, shall we say, is the implementing of the nine element plan to reduce phosphorus.
Bill Roege: Right, so that plan was approved three years ago and so mostly the soil and water conservation districts in each county have been what we've relied on to implement it as well as our watershed steward Ian Smith at SWIO. But we just did a strategic planning effort over the summer and we decided that really probably the most important thing we could do is help organize, maybe not organize, that's a little bit too strong, but encourage all the different players that are involved in reducing the sediments and the phosphorus and nutrients from coming into the lake. That involves a lot of different projects. There's 42 municipalities in our watershed and so trying to get them organized is literally herding calves. So we're starting an effort to engage with as many as possible in order to encourage them to think of projects, seek out projects, and then seek out grants in order to get the funding they need in order to help reduce the nutrients coming into the lake.
Paul Szmal: Now one of the things that the Seneca Lake Pier Wanderers Association does is they monitor for things like harmful algal blooms and lake level fluctuations. What kind of results came back from the summer months?
Bill Roege: So another interesting year I'll say. So the Habs, if you remember last year, was just way over the top, over 300 sightings and weeks every day where we'd have them. This year, August, didn't see very many. What we noticed is that August last year was very calm and this year it was very windy and so we think that had a big impact on not seeing the Habs then. But then September calmed down and so we were seeing Habs through September as we kind of have over the last few years. But really, shout out, we continue to people around the lake looking diligently, reporting diligently to try to get the word out and we have our tech system, alert system, so that people can sign up for that, learn, know that the Habs are around in somewhat real time, that they need to be looking out, making sure that they're safe.
Paul Szmal: One of the other, yeah, go ahead.
Bill Roege: No, go ahead Bill, go ahead.
Bill Roege: I'm just gonna say one of the other programs that we just started this year is kind of like Habs, Cladophora, we get a lot of complaints about it, even though they're not toxic or anything, but when they decay on the shoreline, it gives a real foul smell. So we have a research program with the Finger Lakes Institute that's sort of modeled after the Habs program where we had people around and we have a reporting app and people could report, you know, when there is Cladophora, when there wasn't Cladophora, and mixed with that were students from the university, the colleges going out in kayaks to look for various weeds, Cladophora as well as other weeds, and what was really fascinating this year is that there were literally no weeds out there. So normally there's milfoil, which is an invasive that's fall over the place, eelgrass, spirogyra, even the Cladophora, just there was some Cladophora, but not as much as we've seen in past years. And there was literally none of the other weeds. And just we're scratching our heads now.
Paul Szmal: And what a, what a weird data point.
Bill Roege: Yeah, agreed, agreed.
Paul Szmal: What about fluctuations in the lake level this year?
Bill Roege: Yeah, so we got a lot of complaints. Anyone that's been on the lake saw that by September, the lake was getting really, really low. And unfortunately, we tried to get the word out. But unfortunately, I know there's a lot of people that weren't able to get their boats out in time for the winter that normally do. So that's, that's obviously concerning. But if we look back at 2020, which was also a very dry year, it tracked pretty much the same all the way and through September and through October. And what we're seeing is basically, we've reached the winter target level, which is a flick below the summer, we reached those in September, instead of the end of October, so almost two months early. The interesting thing there too, is that at the beginning of the season, we were at the high level mark. So it was almost at 448. So almost two feet above the target in the springtime. So it really went from almost too high to definitely too low.
Paul Szmal: Hmm, interesting.
Paul Szmal: Yeah, some different stats for this year than I think we would have expected from some of those monitoring results. We've got a little bit of time left here. I do want to talk about the fundraising and the volunteer effort that makes all of this stuff happen.
Bill Roege: Well, that's exactly right, where we started our annual appeal, one of our two major fundraising campaigns, we started that the middle of November, and that'll be running through January. Having good luck so far, but hopefully people have been getting hard mailings or emails or listening to the broadcast here, and they can go to our website and join in and either donate, or we're always looking for volunteers, we need volunteers, particularly now to help us manage the organization. We have things like human resources, recruiting for board members and volunteers, membership and fundraising. We even have a lake level committee that's that's monitoring that. So there's, there's so many different ways to support us, again, monetarily, or with your time and efforts. That would, you know, we really would appreciate it. And this isn't the lake, I want to emphasize isn't just for people who live on the lake. I mean, people, we have a lot of people that drink the water, a lot of people like swimming and boating and fishing. And there are studies out there that talk about just being able to look over a landscape and see the beauty as as a calming and a good psychological effect. So again, you don't have to live on a lake in order to care about the lake.
Paul Szmal: Absolutely. By the way, the website is SenecaLake.org. You can keep up with what's going on and news and results of studies, things of that nature, by signing up for the newsletter at that website. Again, it's SenecaLake.org. Bill, pleasure as always. Thank you, sir. Have a great holiday.
Bill Roege: Thank you, Paul. You too.
Paul Szmal: It is 827 on FLX morning.
