St Louis Lake Leaks
For more than a decade, residents of an upscale neighborhood near St. Louis, Missouri have been bogged down by the occasional leak in a lake, including a giant sinkhole that erupted in June 2004. That catastrophic failure, as geologists call it, drained the lake in a matter of days and wound up costing homeowners about $650,000 to fix. It held until Lake Chesterfield slowly started losing water - again - in September.
It may be Missouri's most notorious lake after being featured on national newscasts, but it certainly isn't the only one, geologists say. Visitors to the August A. Busch Memorial Conservation Area in St. Charles County, for instance, need only stroll to the shore of Lake 35 to see its waters have receded 10 feet as the result of a sinkhole, said Marvin Boyer, fisheries management biologist at the Missouri Department of Conservation. A couple of other nearby lakes have leaked as well.
November 8, 2005 3:51 AM | Category: Lake