SAWS staff have deemed a pilot wetlands project successful and are readying to implement the strategy across Mitchell Lake's southern banks.
An egret stands atop a post near the dam at Mitchell Lake, where a project to create manmade wetlands eventually will filter hundreds of millions of gallons of algae-ridden water per day.When Gregg Eckhardt pitched the idea of cleaning up the banks of Mitchell Lake with manmade wetlands more than two-and-a-half decades ago, he wasn’t sure he’d ever see the project actually take off.
Now, six years later, SAWS has deemed its 1-acre pilot successful and is readying to scale up the man-made wetland across up to 100 acres on Mitchell Lake’s southern banks. It’s a dream come true for Eckhardt and his partner on the project, Dan Crowley, director of governmental relations at SAWS.How did we get here?
That all changed, however, after the city bought the lake in 1901, building a dam and then directing raw sewage into the lake. While SAWS was able to better regulate and treat the lake under a wastewater permit and later, in 2020, a stormwater permit, the lake’s pH levels still varied greatly due to the algae.
Gregg Eckhardt, senior analyst with production and treatment operations at San Antonio Water System, stands in a future wetlands cell below Mitchell Lake.While wetlands as a water treatment system are fairly common around the country, no one has ever tried to use wetlands to filter a body of water quite like Mitchell Lake, with its great variation in daily pH levels due to its algae and nutrient-rich state, Eckhardt said.