Drawdown to Clean-up One of Minnesota’s Most Polluted Lakes

RICE -- A massive effort to clean-up Little Rock Lake will start in a few weeks.  A three-foot drawdown of the water starts on August 1st, with the water level going down an inch an hour for 36 hours.

It is a $250,000 project that supporters hope will clean-up the lake that's in the top four percent of the most polluted lakes in Minnesota.

Little Rock Lake Associaton spokeswoman Mary Kivi says they're anxious to see what they find on the lake bottom.

Once it's gone down the three feet we're going to hopefully clean-up any debris.  And we will be planting native plants to improve and protect the quality of the water.

Kivi says the planting will take place on the first two weekends with the help of 500 Boy Scouts and members of the Sauk Rapids-Rice fishing club.

Kivi says about 35-percent of the lake's homeowners have agreed to put plants on their shoreline.

She says the process has been done before on a similar size lake with success.

Clean-up efforts on Little Rock Lake have been ongoing since 2012.

The drawdown will last six weeks and they'll start refilling the lake on September 15th.

She says they have been getting a lot of interest from other lake associations around the state, who will be watching closely to see if this method works.  We likely won't know until next summer.