The return to Mud Lake

BY ED FELIEN

The map above shows the area around Lake Hiawatha in 1900.  It was called Rice Lake on the map, and on earlier maps it was called Mud Lake.
The map is interesting because it shows housing and streets built up all around South Minneapolis; they went as far south as Richfield but not in the immediate area around Lake Hiawatha.  From 42nd Street in the north to Minnehaha Parkway in the south, from Cedar Avenue on the west to 34th Avenue on the east, there are no houses and not even very many streets.  Why?
Lake Hiawatha, Minnehaha Creek and the Chain of Lakes in Minneapolis were all part of a great river draining the melting of the glacier that formed Lake Agasizz that once covered Minnesota, North Dakota and most of central Canada.  It connected to the Minnesota River and then to the Mississippi.  The area around Lake Hiawatha was one of the lowest areas on this ancient river, so a lot of glacial silt settled there.  This made the area muddy and not ideal for housing construction.
Eventually, there was enough of a demand for housing that people built there.  When Theodore Wirth dredged Lake Hiawatha to a depth of 33 feet in 1929 he made housing around the lake a desirable address—in addition to creating a park, a swimmable lake and a golf course.  I grew up on the Mud Flats at 4213 29th Ave. S. and graduated from Roosevelt in 1956.  Our basement always leaked in the spring, and the foundation of the house had shifted and cracked the concrete basement walls.
This problem with basements in houses in the Mud Flats is made worse when the water table gets higher.  The water table gets higher when it can’t drain.  Over the years, Minnehaha Creek has deposited silt from its travels through the Chain of Lakes.  The greatest proportion of that silt has been deposited at its lowest level, that section of the creek from Lake Hiawatha to Minnehaha Falls.
Lake Hiawatha is 4 to 6 feet higher than it was when I was a young boy playing there more than 60 years ago.   That means that the water table for the surrounding area, the Mud Flats, from 42nd Street to the Parkway, from Cedar to 34th Avenue, is 4 to 6 feet higher than it was 60 years ago.  The ground will be saturated to the same level as Lake Hiawatha because, although the bottomland of the ancient Lake Agassiz tributary is great for planting, it soaks up water like a sponge.
The Minneapolis Park & Recreation Board is studying the problem.
Well, actually, that’s not true.  The park board isn’t studying this particular problem.
They’ve hired Barr Engineering to study what would happen if they turned the pumps off on the golf course that have been pumping water from the golf course into Lake Hiawatha.  What?  Why didn’t they ask a third-grader?  If you pump water out of a sponge into a bowl made of the same sponge, the water is going to drift back to the same place where you pumped it out.  If you stop pumping, nothing will happen.
The reason the Mud Flats flood so easily is because the ground is already saturated.  There’s no place for the water to go.
Maybe the park board should study this problem: “Would lowering the water table by 4 feet reduce the problem of flooding?”  I’ll save them another $100,000 on another study and answer the question for them.  Yes, if you lowered the water level by 4 feet you would reduce flooding during heavy rains like those in 2014 that flooded basements in homes in the Mud Flats.
But how could you drain the water table by 4 feet, enough to help prevent flooding?
Surely we will need another $100,000 study to find answer to that perplexing question.
Or, we could probably ask an intelligent third-grader at Jon Ericsson Elementary School.  I can just picture my third-grade teacher, Mrs. Kittleson, drawing a bowl on the chalkboard, with a line on one side representing a pipe bringing water into the bowl and a line on the other representing a pipe going out and a blue chalk line linking the two that represents the water level in the Lake.  And I can see her as she turns to the class and asks, “Now, how could we lower the water level in the bowl?”  I’m sure one of us would have said, “Put the pipe going out a little lower and it will drain out the water to that level.”
“But how would you do that with Lake Hiawatha and the water table of Mud Flats?”
“Why wouldn’t you dredge 4 feet of the Minnehaha Creek bed from where it exits Lake Hiawatha at 28th Avenue down to the Falls?”
“But wouldn’t that be ridiculously expensive?”
I wrote to Tillges Excavating and asked how much they would charge to dredge a creek, digging a trench 4 feet deep, 4 feet wide and 1.3 miles long (about the distance from 28th Avenue to the Falls).  They said, “It would all depend on the conditions. For example if it’s wet conditions you could get as high as 100,000.00 or even higher. I just bid a dig for electric trench one mile long and that bid was for dig and back fill that estimate was 85,000.00. I’d guess if it’s good conditions you’d be looking at 55,000.00 that would be also be spreading out the excess dirt in a reasonable distance from the creek bed.”
$55,000 to $100,000?
That’s about the cost of another study.