Harbor Isle Lake Archive • St. Pete, FL
Harbor Isle Lake Archive seeks to provide access to historical and current public data regarding water quality and projects involving Harbor Isle Lake, a City managed retention pond, in Harbor Isle neighborhood, St. Petersburg, FL.
Welcome to Harbor Isle Lake Archive. This website was created to allow awareness and better transparency regarding the data being collected for the lake's water quality, overall health, and more specifically, the city remediation process regarding the toxic cyanobacteria 'blue-green algae' (BGA) that has been observed consistently reoccurring in the lake since July 2018.
Harbor Isle Lake is a man-made lake, completed in the 1970's. The land area was excavated and the excess soil was used to build up and create the Harbor Isle neighborhood land layout known today. The lake, though used for aesthetic and recreational purposes, also functions as a retention pond, with 13 storm drain inputs, that collect the street and property run-off to prevent residential flooding and reduce the influence of water pollution into the surrounding Weedon Island Preserve and Bay. The lake also has 1 outlet, that is used when the lake reaches certain levels to protect against overfilling and again, potential flooding.
Photo credit: Harbor Isle Lake Journal, used with permission
Unfortunately, the lake has been plagued by poor decisions in remediation for decades. In 2001, the City approved a fill-project, which was supposed to improve water quality by lowering the lake water depths, yet there was no City data for assessment done prior or after the completion of this project. More detailed information can be found on Harbor Isle Lake Journal's Lake History Timeline (1978-2002) page. Harbor Isle Lake has measured the highest Microcystin levels (BGA produced liver toxin) in the state (2020, 2021) by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FL-DEP); the water body continues to measure detectable and extremely high levels of toxins in BGA scums since 2019, after citizen reporting. It still poses a significant public health risk to the residents and any visitor, especially due to the unknown long-term health effects of these air and water toxins and the growing scientific research linking harmful algae bloom exposure to increased risk to illness, certain cancers, and even, neurodegenerative diseases. [1]
Despite this public health risk and unresolved environmental issue, the public documentation provided here, or a similar timeline of updates, has not been organized and made publicly available by the City, for interested parties or concerned residents, even with multiple requests since 2020. [2] The City of St. Pete has continued to withhold information, provide misinformation through various channels, and be slow to produce timely updates for their Harbor Isle Lake Remediation Project, if any at all. [3] City personnel continue, with no intention, to improve their communication methods, construct legal and formal announcements (such as with City personnel signatures), in order to better elucidate the affected residents, provide evidentiary information to support their choices, or allow informed 3rd party review of their assessments.
All documents provided on this website, are City of St. Petersburg public records and should be available as such, upon request if further verification necessitates.
Sources
[1] Winchester, J. (2020, July 7) Research reveals how red tide, blue-green algal blooms could affect your health. Wink News.
[2] Anonymous. (2020, November 22) blue-green algae in lake [and action requests]. SeeClickFix.
https://seeclickfix.com/issues/8954408-blue-green-algae-in-lake
[3] Marketing from City of St. Petersburg. (2019, January 22) Algae bloom in progress. NextDoor.