Keeping Tahoe Alive

To the Indians, Lake Tahoe meant "Big Water," a laconic understatement even for an Indian. Twenty-two miles long, twelve miles wide and one-third of a mile deep, Tahoe is the third largest alpine lake in the world (after the Peruvian-Bolivian Titicaca and Oregon's Crater Lake). Poured out over California, it would submerge the entire state in 14 1/2 in. of water. Withal, Tahoe is a volcanic and glacial marvel, ringed for one-third of the year by snow-dazzling mountain tops. To Mark Twain, Tahoe was a "noble sheet of blue water." In the past decade, it has faintly but frighteningly threatened to become a vast dead sea of green slime.

That it has not done so is a wonder, for among other conspicuous firsts, Americans are without equal as nature's vandals-by-indifference. At Lake Tahoe, the story is hearteningly the reverse. For nearly a decade, local, state and federal agencies have fought valiantly and, it now seems, successfully, to save Tahoe from the fate that has necessitated a long-range antipollution cleanup program for Lake Erie. What has been achieved at Tahoe is the arresting of the life cycle of the lake so that its crystalline waters may retain the remarkable purity that still ranks them far above the federally required drinking standards of the U.S.

6,000,000 Visitors. A lake dies of eutrophication, or quite simply over-nourishment. With or without humans, accumulations of sewage draining its way through the earth feeds a lake with nitrate and phosphate nutrients, the baby food of algae and plankton. Gingerly tugging the shore line at first, these willowy green growths are the stuff that giant, billowing swamps are later made of. After a few centuries or a millennium, a meadow sits where a lake once sparkled. In his wanton, willful way, man can speed up this process to mere decades.

The speedup that was overtaking Tahoe, and which imperils many another U.S. lake of natural beauty, is the population-cum-recreation explosion. In 1956, Tahoe was a drowsy summer paradise of about 3,000 residents; by 1965, it was a turbulent tourist mecca of gaudy gambling casinos, glaring neon bar strips, and other commercialized enticements playing to camping-room-only crowds. Now with just under 6,000,000 visitors annually, even the foresight that led the South Tahoe Public Utilities District to build and thrice expand its sewage disposal plant from 1958 on has proved woefully inadequate; the plant, with a top disposal capacity of 2.5 million gallons of sewage a day, is being called upon to deal with some 4,000,000 gallons of waste this year.

Solomon's Wives. To cope with this sewage glut and salvage Tahoe from pollution required the harnessing of stubborn private interests, bickering bureaucrats, and jurisdictional factionalists. To indicate the prickly enormity of the problem, Tahoe is administered not only by the two states (California and Nevada) whose border virtually bisects the lake, but also by five counties and 64 governmental agencies. Last week, as if all of Solomon's wives had for once displayed the wisdom of Solomon, these groups agreed on a simple solution that by 1970 will forever end the threat of pollution at Lake Tahoe. A mammoth disposal plant (6,000,000 gallons' capacity) will filter the waste to the acceptable standard for drinking water, and three export pipelines will be constructed to carry the "effluents," as the processed waste is called, over the mountains and out of the Tahoe Basin completely. Pollution control will cost $40 million; but besides keeping Tahoe true blue, it will also provide much needed irrigation for Nevada's desert lands and create a new federal reservoir in California's Alpine County.

More significantly, the history of pollution control at Lake Tahoe shows the necessity for early vigilance and persistent action. Man against nature is an outmoded cry; the saving of Lake Tahoe sensibly answers the need felt by the present generation of Americans--to preserve nature for man.

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