At Lake Accotink, mud is a hazard
If Lake Accotink is not dredged and begins to fill in with sediment, some people have speculated that it will become an unhealthy, bug-infested swamp.
Vanessa Robertson warns of another danger – quicksand.
When Robertson, a military veteran who has undergone survival training, learned about Fairfax County’s plan to not dredge Lake Accotink, “I immediately imagined a vast plan of quicksand in what is currently the lake bed,” she wrote to members of the Board of Supervisors on March 10.
An incident posted on the Save Lake Accotink Community Facebook group seems to confirm her fears.
A man described how he was trying to walk across the mud to the island and found the silt “is much more treacherous than it seems.”
He was walking on dry leaves, he says, when “suddenly, my left foot sank about foot into the mud, and my right root sank almost two feet. It must have been some sort of hole under the silt. I could not extract my feet due to the heavy suction.”
When he tried to get out, he only sank further. “I was stuck, really stuck,” he wrote. Eventually, he was able to use his walking stick to push his way out. He says it was “one of the scariest moments of my life, because I didn’t know how far I might sink.”
Related story: Dredging Lake Accotink is not financially or environmentally feasible
The water levels at the lake had been lowered, starting a couple of weeks ago, to facilitate the replacement of the flashboards at the top of the dam and clear away the debris that had collected there, said Lake Accotink project manager Charles Smith.
The project should be completed by now, and the water level will return to normal. At the same time, the $3 million project to replace the trail at the outfall of the dam with an elevated walkway is nearing completion.
What the man got stuck in wasn’t quicksand, Smith said. “In wetlands, you can often find pockets of sucking mud strong enough to pull your shoes off.”
“You can easily get stuck,” he said. “But there’s no danger of being sucked down and suffocating. Real quicksand happens when there is an underground water source with water flowing under the surface. “There no indication of any underground water under the lake,” and even if it’s dredged, there won’t be quicksand.
The Fairfax County Department of Public Works recommended that the lake not be dredged due to the high cost – $400 million over the next 25 years – as well as significant environmental and social impacts.
Another man who still lives in the home he grew up in near Lake Accotink posted a scary story about getting stuck in quicksand decades ago. His father had taught him how to use pulleys and ropes to rescue workers from the quicksand that developed when the lake was emptied in 1968.
The silt eventually hardened, but there were a few spots where the silt retained the consistency of chocolate pudding well over six feet deep, the man recalled. One time, he and a friend waded into the lake looking for snakes and turtles and got stuck up to their waists.
“We were trapped,” he said. “And the more we tried to get out, the deeper we sank.” It took them about half an hour to pull themselves out.
Related story: Lake Accotink dredging project not likely to happen, due to increased cost
Robertson urged the Board of Supervisors to investigate the potential danger of quicksand before letting the lake fill in. “It’s only a matter of time before a child is caught in the quicksand and killed,” she said.
If the lake is not dredged, there’s no way to estimate how long it could take for the lake to fill up with sediment, Smith said, although he expects it will take many years.
Meanwhile, he says, as the lake gradually turns into a wetland, there are creative ways to intentionally manage the process to make it more predictable.
18 responses to “At Lake Accotink, mud is a hazard”
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I’m afraid I no longer believe in whatever the county’s project manager and the Public Works Department have to say regarding the lake after their tremendous miscalculation for the cost to dredge the lake. The county apparently no longer cares about will happen to the Lake. Supervisor Walkinshaw has not offered any alternatives for the lake and all the surrounding residents. All the wildlife will be affected not just the humans.
Keep voting the way you’ve been voting, and life will continue to get worse.
How true….The elected officials voted themselves a $40,000 per year raise this year, but care less about citizen safety. Not only for the Lake, but for the increase in crime in NORVA. The police and fire departments could have used that kind of increase, instead of a part time board of supervisors.
“There [is] no indication of any underground water under the lake”? Wouldn’t one say the presence of quicksand or “sucking mud” or whatever you want to call it is an indication of “underground water”? Lake Accotink Park is in Springfield. SPRINGfield. The park is full of springs. Of course there are springs inside the lake footprint. And those springs will affect the nature of whatever wetlands form, if the county fails to dredge. After decades of unmitigated sedimentation, maybe those springs will one day be of little consequence, but Mr. Smith’s refusal to acknowledge the credibility of and to give due consideration to residents’ substantiated concerns calls into question the county’s other claims about dredging and the viability of allowing Lake Accotink to fill in. Will it really cost $95 million to dredge? What will it truly cost to let the lake fill in? Who will pay? savelakeaccotink.org
Can someone ask Charles Smith if the term “quagmire” is okay with him? Clearly that giant sucking sound is not coming from NAFTA. If people have the sensation of sinking and a hard time extricating themselves (with or without shoes), it strikes me as a phenomenon that should be taken seriously.
Not being in danger of suffocating is not the same as not being in danger. The commonality of quicksand and not-exactly-quicksand appears to be seemingly solid ground that unexpectedly gives way. Rather than investigating whether Charles Smith and “Scientific American” are in complete agreement on whether an underground water source is a necessary element of quicksand, perhaps the County could address the untoward nature of trying to lift oneself from sinking sands in a public lake. However temporary the situation might be, a cautionary sign or two might be in order.
Fascinating. Isn’t this a precious wetland then? Weren’t we told for years that dredging is bad?
Fyi: When the Army Corp of Engineers had lake accotink they had 3 siltation ponds to the right of the concession stand the creek emptied onto those ponds.. they would dredge those ponds… the water of the lake was crystal clear. The FCPA filed the ponds fir more parking.. and straightened the stream out to dump directly into the lake… adding a huge silt load to the lake. It is with out a doubt the FCPA that ruined the lake by removing the siltation ponds.. it’s a no brainer.. the creek has to be redirected into a siltation catch area. For the system to work as it was designed. Use some freakin common sense..
This is great information! I’m looking at the 1953 aerial photography, and it seems to show a pond exactly where the parking lot is and extending past the Carousel area, but I can’t see the other two ponds. If you don’t mind, could you take a look at: https://fairfaxcountygis.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=0612f9deb6bb4f0a9fa5cdce0cc75144
and let me know in which direction to look?
Exactly. I’m an engineer and wondered why engineers didn’t step up and say this. Seems to me – the more I dredge – that FCPA wants to cover its tracks.
The County spent the last five years acting like they were going to dredge, then suddenly in Feb they have a new report that the County engineer and stormwater mgr (Chas Smith) are going to recommend to the Board of Supervisors that they not fund the dredging project. That left little time to get the word out, so I don’t know if its that or if the County engineer and the engineering firm they hired to find roadblocks have effectively discouraged other County engineers from contributing to the discussion. For engineers outside the County system, I think its been a hit or miss in getting people interested, though not for lack of trying. Perhaps you could relay more of your thoughts at savelakeaccotinkdotorg. It would be much appreciated.
You can read the presentation/report presented in Feb:
short version: https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/publicworks/stormwater/plans-projects/lake-accotink-dredging-ac89-0009
long version: https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/publicworks/sites/publicworks/files/assets/documents/projects/lake-accotink-dredging-alternatives-analysis-report-071221.pdf
Oh, good grief. Now it’s going to be a plain of quicksand? Here’s something that works with both mud and quicksand… if you feel yourself being sucked in, grasp at something, like maybe straws. Kind of like these people…
The county will probably turn it over to FCPS for another parking structure!
Working hard to reverse climate change…just not at Lake Accotink, where removing sediment built up over time will literally work. Responsible land stewardship?- nope. Not when it’s prime real estate in a modest diverse neighborhood.
Amity, respect, and harmony are the principles we should apply to the discussion of the future of Lake Accotink.
Dark conspiracies with ulterior motives? We see instead good-faith public servants and citizens faced with a daunting challenge which offers no straightforward solutions.
The mudflats seen during the repairs are temporary. If a lake-to-wetlands future truly did come to pass, we have every reason to expect that the entire area would resemble the upper part of the lake that filled in decades ago – creek channels passing through typically dry land covered with vegetation and trees.
http://www.accotink.org
From your own page: “The Friends of Accotink Creek concur that retaining the lake is the least bad option now available.”
I love the cost of a dredge keeps going up each time we see a quote from the county. The last I saw was 300M over 20 years (which is BS) … now we hear 400M and no mention of the time-frame. Where there’s a will there’s a way. The residents want to keep the lake – let’s find a way to make it happen! Just like the BoS found a way to give themselves a raise – we can find a way to get them out.
Is the sluice clear? How deep is the water at the dam? Is the spillway all mucked up? Maintenance? “Sluicing/drawdown routing”on a regular basis, especially in the heavy rain time, would probably fix it. Turbulate, man. The silt would go down the creek. It would restore the channel like it was in ’68, when we fished the creek at the bottom of the lake bed when it was drained. All them carp. And btw, we called it quickmud. Treacherous.