Birchwood residents pride themselves on being the “Bluegill Capital of the World”, but are worried that may change now that officials have begun using herbicides to treat curly leaf pondweed in Big Chetac Lake.
The first application took place this spring and was supposed to be on a 90-acre test area, but the chemical drifted more than 1 ½ miles killing most of the vegetation in an 800-acre area of the lake.
While surveys may have shown strong support for the herbicide treatment, many residents are concerned about the long-term effects of herbicides on the lake’s ecosystem and that the curly leaf pondweed has been on the lake for decades and is limited to certain parts of the lake and is only present from late-May to late-June.