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T. Brown Photography
Traci Angel
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University of Arkansas Press
We try to avoid writing in the first person on Look-Listen, but we are going to break from that tradition today...
When I landed at St. Louis Magazine, I inherited Traci Angel’s desk, many of her duties (including running the internship program and writing the back-page historical photo feature, Flashback), her potted plants, and lots of recycled press-kit folders in her filing drawers. Angel had been at SLM for years, editing the Neighborhoods section, Frontlines (now Current) and keeping the trains running on time as Managing Editor. She left to accept a Knight Editing Fellowship at University of Missouri-Columbia, where she worked as co-editor of the general assignment beat at the Columbia Missourian, and got her grad degree in health and science journalism. When her new book, The Scars of Project 459: The Environmental Story of Lake of the Ozarks (University of Arkansas Press, 147 pages, $32.50) landed on my desk, it was a neat full-circle moment. But it was also clear that we needed to cover this, SLM alum concerns aside: it’s pretty much the only book out there examining the environmental problems at Lake of the Ozarks from a wide-scale, scientific perspective. It’s a must-read for anyone who loves the Missouri wilderness, especially those who spend a lot of time outdoors in our not-always-pristine waterways.
The title refers to the U.S. Government’s name for this vast body of water, which was formed when Ameren (formerly Union Electric) dammed the Osage River to create the Bagnell Dam in 1929. The Bagnell dam, which was built to generate electricity, of course had its immediate impacts: it not only obliterated lots of bird and animal habitat, but several small towns as well. The area has remained mostly rural, even as it has attracted thousands of tourists over the decades. The problem that’s emerging now, which Angel writes about in her book, is that many of those former tourists are settling around the lake permanently—and the huge increase in year-round population is having an impact on the water and the landscape.
Angel will be at Left Bank Books (399 N. Euclid, left-bank.com) this Thursday, June 19 at 7 p.m. to read from and answer questions about the book. For more information—including updates on the situation at the lake—check out Angel’s book website, scarsofproject459.com. We talked by phone a few weeks ago about Scars, the challenges of reporting it, and the problems of one of Missouri’s most beloved outdoor destinations.
This interview has been shortened and edited for publication.
So after you left SLM, you landed at University of Missouri-Columbia—that’s when the Lake of the Ozarks book started to take shape?
Yes, exactly. I was reading the newspaper—I think it was an Associated Press article about this watershed group that started in 2006. Things started to connect. I remembered my childhood memories there, and then also my interests in the environment and thinking, “Oh wow, somebody's going to do something about this,” because I had heard a lot from people saying, “Oh yes, there’s sewage, there's all these problems, you don’t want to swim in it,” but I didn't know anything for sure. I thought, “Well, you know, this could be a magazine article.” That’s what I had in mind first, and I talked to the woman who started the watershed group [Donna Swall of Lake of the Ozarks Watershed Alliance], and tried talking to a historian down there at the lake, Dwight Weaver. Just by talking about the different issues and the challenges of it, it stuck with me. I ended up getting some public records because I wanted to actually prove, OK, here's where some of the sewage spills were. I got notices of violation from the Department of Natural Resources, the state agency that monitors when there is a sewage leak, so I could start to map it out. I tried to make a bigger-picture story of this, using some scientific evidence, or at least some public records, and I put together a magazine article for Ozarks Magazine in 2008. I had this 5,000-word piece all written, and I included some of the other Ozarks watershed groups down in Springfield as the editor had asked me to do. It was tied in together about these watershed groups trying to make improvements, and then the magazine folded right before it was published. [Laughs.]
I graduated and took a job in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and worked for the newspaper there, but the story just stuck with me, and I ended up pitching it to the Columbia Tribune, which is the daily paper there in Columbia, Missouri. I knew one of the project editors there, and he said OK, Sure, we’ll publish this, it'll be a great weekend feature. So we condensed it down, and he updated it with a little bit of information.
Then we moved back to Missouri in 2009, and I was still reading stories about it, and they had a big political scandal—basically, they didn't release the [bacteria count] numbers [at the lake] until after the [Memorial Day] holiday season, because they were afraid tourists would be afraid to come, and everyone would lose money. The state government, their spokesperson was like, “Oh yeah, I guess that would be in our circle of influence,” and “Yeah, we did take that into consideration.” She basically admitted that it was withheld, and so there was all of this public outcry. People followed it for a couple of years, and then as the government stepped in and said, “Oh, we want to do something about it,” it just sort of quieted down.
I pitched [the book] it to a publishing house back in 2010, and several rejected it, but finally the University of Arkansas Press said, “Yeah, this sounds like a good idea.” I started looking into updates, and realized that this was still a story that was yet to be told. People weren’t talking about it. The lake had done a pretty good job with public relations, trying to take a handle on it, and even the tone of the watershed group had changed by the time I revisited it and was reporting for this book. Initially they were much more of a watchdog group, much more about “We’ve got to do something about this,” and seemed more engaged. This time, they were much more about preventative stuff and education, which is all great, and it’s all a part of it, but they are not really saying, “We still have problems and challenges,” which is what I was finding in the scientific data and other information.
Reading the book, it also reminded me of the Riverfront Times story from a few years ago, which found that pretty much every watershed in Missouri has some problems with bacteria.
Yes, yes, I read that, and I tried to reach out to some other environmental groups but they all just kind of laughed, and said, yeah, the lake is a lost cause. They’re trying to work on a broader scale. I think that article had mentioned they're really trying to get the standards higher overall, instead of just working with one lake here, or one stream there, and take a broader approach to improving things.
I know reporting the book was really challenging, because no one wanted to talk—there is even that section where you print, verbatim, these stonewalling emails from state government. That, to me, was very revealing.
That was the nice thing about this platform of the book, and the editors—they were really accommodating, and they let me do this for transparency’s sake. You can say, OK, you might realize there’s something missing from this book, and here’s why. I enjoy reading correspondences, because you get a bigger story. They have their say as well in those emails.
And it wasn’t just the state government who didn’t want to talk…
It’s a small town where everybody knows everyone, so I’d have people tell me these stories, but I couldn't quote them because they own this business or they are somebody in the community, and this is who they have to talk to on a daily basis or work with or collaborate with, whether in business or, I don't know, you know, on a personal level. So, yeah, that was one of the challenges.
Can you talk about the issue with the antiquated septic tanks, and the shift from resort to permanent communities around the lake? I know that is really core here.
I think if you were to say, “OK, so where’s the problem?” a lot of people would say, “This is the problem.” When these homes were built in the ‘50s and the ‘60s, they were these smaller, weekender homes. People would drive in from St. Louis or Kansas City, and just stay there for a weekend and go boating and swimming. Many families still do that. And as in many rural areas, they had a septic tank, and many of these have not been maintained. Every so many years, you need to check to make sure it’s not leaking, make sure it’s working properly. A lot of baby boomers and other people have started moving down there full-time after retirement, and these systems are working overtime. And maybe they are leaking. I have even heard that when they put these in, the regulations were lax—I mean, they were like 55-gallon drums, instead of the actual canister or the appropriate container, so they have all these problems. It’s a big expense, but if you’re living down there on a more regular basis, it’s going to have a lot more wear and tear than if you were coming down a couple of times during the summer and using it. So the aging, failing septic tanks are something that the Watershed Group is trying to target and educate people about. I think they're in the process of getting grants and trying to find some funding.
I made one of my last phone calls [for the book] to a health inspector down there. She actually goes around to the septic tanks. I think I quoted her in the last chapter. She is pretty straightforward. I kept saying that the attorney general’s office said they would start enforcing this or that; they would stay on top of this. I asked, have you seen anything since they had their big symposium to clean up the lake? She said, “No, not really,” and then she gave me three or four anecdotal things: “I was just at somebody else’s property. Their neighbors had called me. Yes, they went through an attorney directly…” This was just her daily rapport with me. She said they talked [about enforcement] but they did not really see much action.
What else is important for people to know about the book or about this problem? It seems no one else has really tackled it in this holistic way.
Right, I mean that was the purpose of the book. It was the one place where if you have these questions or apprehensions about the lake, I tried to put it all together. Some of the newspaper articles referenced studies here and there. I made records requests. I have these pages and pages of public records, so I’m hoping that, you know, people, if they’re interested, they at least have the reference now for it, and can go get it themselves. Or I’d be happy to email them.
Also, I avoided—even though it would’ve been probably a much different story, a racier story—the anecdotal stories. I really focused on the scientific and the historical and the academic because of this particular topic, you know, it’s—
Well, it’s charged.
Exactly, it’s a very charged topic... I didn’t want to just start throwing around he said-she said, and you know, situations that couldn’t be proven.
