MILLARDSVILLE, Pa. — A lake in Lebanon County serves as one of the most popular locations for scuba divers in the Mid-Atlantic region to get certified.
Facing a murky future because of worsening underwater visibility, the park is taking steps to make the water clearer.
Willow Springs Dive Park has been a scuba dive training hub since the 1970s, though it has seen fewer divers in recent years.
After Dutch Springs, another major dive training lake in the Lehigh Valley, closed in 2021, Willow Springs was suddenly flooded with requests from dive shops. In the summer of 2022, the facility hosted more than 4,000 divers.
“Taking it from a lake that had a history of being a center for dive training and bringing it back again for dive training had challenges,” said John Walker, owner of Lancaster Scuba, which co-manages diving at Willow Springs with dive site organization Dive Peer. “But the challenges are worth it to see the smiles on people who get certified.”
Those challenges included limited dock space and a lack of permanent bathrooms or showers.
One of the biggest challenges for divers, though, was low visibility underwater. Though the lake was clear in the 1970s, it has grown more and more algae over the years. By this summer, divers could only see about two to three feet in front of them.
Willow Springs staff said it was unclear why the lake has become murkier, but that the Pa. Department of Environmental Protection was looking into the situation.
Low visibility can become a safety issue for divers, especially those just getting started.
“When they become a new diver, they’re going to have some anxiety. When the visibility is lower, that’s just one more thing they have on their mind where they’re having trouble seeing their instructor and that kind of thing,” Walker said.
Managers of the lake decided to take action and invest $80,000 to clear the underwater view. On Sept. 14 a crew treated the lake with 12,000 gallons of alum, a non-toxic chemical often used to clean water.
“We use alum to reduce the phosphorus in the water. That’s the food source for the algae, so that helps control the harmful algae blooms,” said John Barrow, project manager with Solitude Lake Management, which performed the treatment.
Willow Springs staff said their goal was to get 35 to 40 feet of visibility by next summer. That goal was necessary, they said, to maintain the stream of divers and the income they bring to the local economy.
“People need places to stay and they go out and eat, that kind of thing. That’s the economic part of it,” Walker said.
Staff said they have made plans for other improvements, such as adding more docks to enter the water, and will continue to update the facility to ensure anyone in the Mid-Atlantic region can get scuba certified close to home.