Dam malfunction drains entire lake in Minnesota state park, leaves ‘thousands’ of fish floundering

On their first-ever visit to William O’Brien State Park on Sunday, Dave and Tracy Rowe of Ironwood, Mich., noticed something odd about the park’s Lake Alice: It was empty.

The water was mostly gone, drained away through a pipe, and in its place were a few pools of water in a field of decaying weeds littered with dead and dying fish.

The pair’s evening hike became an urgent mission to save whatever fish they could by plucking gasping northern pike and other species out of shallow water to carry them to the St. Croix River, just 50 feet away over an earthen berm.

“We literally reached in and carried fish over to the other side,” Dave Rowe said.

The lake drained over the weekend after a 64-year-old mechanism for regulating Lake Alice’s water levels failed, leaving a valve stuck open.

The lake had been full as of Friday morning. Too full, actually, and park staff had opened the valve so that lake levels would drop. They came back Saturday morning to close the valve and immediately noticed something wrong, said Park Manager Wayne Boerner.

“We went to close the valve and there was no resistance,” he said.

Enter the fish rescues. Campers who normally would have spent the morning admiring Lake Alice from nearby picnic tables or wetting a line at the fishing dock instead found themselves in an urgent DIY operation.

Jordan Pollock, a Forest Lake Area High School teacher of agriculture and natural resources, said he and his family used a lure they found to snag about a dozen northern pike. Once they had a fish up on the dock, they jammed a finger into its gills to carry it across the berm. Pollock’s wife, Angie, cut her hands on the pike’s razor-sharp teeth and gills. Their son snagged another pike Monday morning as reporters from the Twin Cities arrived.

As the family helped him carry the pike away to safety, more northerns, sunfish, carp, and minnows struggled to breathe in water under the fishing dock. Their dark forms filled the spaces between scores of fish floating upside down, their white bellies clustering on the water’s surface. Dorsal fins cut back and forth in a handful of shallow pools.

Lake Alice was created in 1961 to answer demands for more fishing and swimming areas at the state park near Marine on St. Croix.

The St. Croix River is nearby, but with steep banks, tannin-darkened waters and a steady current, the river isn’t safe for small children. The area that became Lake Alice was originally a forest perched on leaky ground, with some 30 underground springs seeping into the nearby river.

Jake Stendahl lives nearby and regularly walks around the 26-acre lake. He was there midweek, but on Sunday when he returned, the spring-fed lake was gone.

“There was not a lake there,” Stendahl said. “There was a little stream. You could see the weeds, but no lake.”

The lake is a “great fishing resource” stocked with a wide variety of fish, including bluegill, black crappie, largemouth bass, northern pike, walleye, yellow perch and bullhead, the DNR said. The absence of water allowed Stendahl to wander into the lake bed where he saw “thousands of fish” dying. “They were struggling for life.”

Though the air smelled “fishy,” it was not too overpowering, he said.

The lake also has a beach frequented by campers — no longer usable — and a nearby boat launch offering access to the St. Croix River. The boat launch was functioning normal on Monday.

Even with a fix, the lake will take time to fill in. It was partly drained in 2015 to fight Eurasian milfoil, and refilling it then took 28 days.

Boerner said he would prefer a solution that’s quick, but the mechanism that broke will take time to replace. The berm itself is still intact.

The short-term solution could be something as simple as a piece of plywood to cover the open pipe while his team repairs whatever went wrong inside the berm.

Boerner said he’s already been in touch with the state fisheries to tell them that once Lake Alice is ready he’s going to need a lot of fish.