A resident of Green Lake has taken it upon herself to measure the water levels of the popular recreation destination.
Sandy Labinsky is a retired police officer from Nevada who spends part of her time in South Green Lake and has been measuring Green Lake since 2023. On August 15, Labinsky made a Facebook post, stating that lake levels were currently one meter above the all-time low in 1989 - and that the lake was down .667 metres/26 inches from the all-time high in 2020.
Labinsky states that a lot of the years, the water is too low in Green Lake to be flushing into nearby Little Green Lake, located not far to the east. That means anything that ends up in the lake will stay there.
"There's no flushing action in the lake, and contaminants that make it into the lake don't have anywhere to go during these years when the lake is not flushing at all," Labinsky said. "Monitoring the lake levels and making people aware of that can hopefully make people more mindful using lawn fertilizers or detergents, or being really careful with their boat gas because there's not a lot of water turnover in Green Lake."
Labinsky says she monitors the lake's water levels because she always has found it intriguing to know what the lake is doing.
"And when I posted it to our community Facebook page, it seemed like a lot of other folks were also interested," stated Labinsky.
Green Lake was once measured by Environment Canada between 1969 and 1995. After Environment Canada stopped conducting such surveys, there was a lull in data between 1996 and 2003. Labinsky's father, Gordon Labinsky, took on the job until he passed away last year.
"My dad set up his measuring system in 2003 - and that's when he went and viewed the old gauge that Environment Canada still had in place so he could figure out the difference between his own measuring scale and theirs," Labinsky said. "I haven't been able to find anybody who had the exact measurements that we could fill in that gap."
Labinsky asks anyone with reliable data from these years to message her, so she can reconcile that with her own measuring scale and family-kept data. She can be reached through Facebook Messenger.
