Minnesota will take 13 lakes off its list of polluted or impaired waters this year -- waterways that have been cleaned of major problems -- but the state is adding another 511 lakes and river segments to the troubled list.
Minnesota Pollution Control Agency officials said Tuesday they have finalized their every-other-year update to the state's Impaired Waters List as required by the federal Clean Water Act.
Adding 511 waterways and removing 13 this year leaves the total at 3,643 impaired waters -- lakes and stretches of rivers that don't meet minimum federal standards for drinking, fishing or swimming.
Going on the impaired list in the Northland are Miller and Paleface creeks, the White Pine and St. Louis rivers between the Whiteface and Floodwood rivers, and several streams below taconite operations on the Iron Range.
Most are listed because fish and aquatic life is suspected to be declining because of pollution or because fish contain too much mercury for all people to eat safely.
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It's not necessarily that more lakes are becoming polluted, but the PCA is getting around to testing more lakes. At least two years of data is gathered before a waterway is listed. The pollution can come from urban or agriculture runoff or airborne pollutants such as mercury, sewage or industrial waste.
Restoring a waterway to get it off the list can take years, so PCA officials Tuesday focused on the good news -- that the total of 13 waterways moving off the list this year is nearly double the seven that moved off the list in 2010.
Shannon Lotthammer, the PCA's director of environmental outcomes, said in announcing the changes that it is "promising to see the number of restored waters nearly double since 2010. Staff, local partners and citizens put a lot of effort into restoring these waters -- it's great to see their efforts paying off."
The PCA has started or completed checking more than half of the state's 81 major watersheds. The state is on track to monitor all of the state's watersheds once every 10 years to see if they have improved or declined in water quality.
