Summer fish kill at Fremont area lake - WOWT

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OMAHA, Neb. (WOWT) - A small lake in Fremont is dealing with a big fish problem. As in a large quantity of dead fish.

The summer fish kill greeted residents at the private Summer Haven Lake on Friday morning, one day after a specialist treated a portion of the lake for algae.

“The smell is horrendous, the smell is awful,” said Suzanne Sall, who lives at the lake most of the year. Her friend Sheila Andre lives at Summer Haven year-round and has been going to the lake since she was a child. “I went down to try and scoop some of the fish up,” Andre said. “I thought I was gonna throw up.”

Since Friday residents have been scooping and cleaning and removing the fish from the shoreline. Each day, more dead fish have to be removed.

“The first day or so was carp and a lot of the rough fish, the white bass and the gizzard chad,” said Steve Mathison, who lives in Omaha and spends much of the summer at his lake house. “Then about mid-day Saturday through yesterday, the game fish started to die, that would be your crappie, white bass, some of the catfish and today, that would again be the game fish, mostly crappie and some small mouth bass.”

Mathison said plenty of fish remain, for now, and looking ahead residents simply want to know what happened. Aquatic biologist Rob Hofpar has more than twenty years experience, and said that his treatment shouldn’t have caused such a large oxygen crash. He had originally been called in to treat the water last week after residents reported a green, almost soupy look to the lake.

Hofpar said a large algae bloom die-off like the one they were seeing can cause rapid loss of oxygen in the water.

In a letter to residents that he shared with WOWT, Hofpare, an aquatic biologist with Nebraska Lake Management, said: “Most summer fish kills are the result of this phenomenon and usually occur after a period of hot weather followed by cloudy days, storms or cold fronts that cause algae bloom to die off, which is exactly what occurred Friday.”

Results of water samples taken to an independent clinic by Hofpare should provide a good idea of what caused the fish kill. It could take more than a month to get those results. Some residents expressed concern about the status of their well water, in addition to any health hazards the decaying fish might bring.

Meanwhile, the cleanup continues and those who were looking forward to a leisurely Labor Day weekend on the lake are likely to make other choices.

“You think about tubers, water skiers, people who are looking to get in the water, that’s probably gonna be really limited,” Mathison said. “Whether or not you talk about is it a biohazard is one thing, but its just the optics. Anybody want to really go in?”

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