SARANAC LAKE - It's pretty easy to blame the sand-salt pile for Lake Colby's saltiness, but it may not be the only culprit.

Tests by both the village and the Adirondack Watershed Institute have shown that the level of salt in a tributary of Lake Colby next to the village's sand-salt pile on Van Buren Street is particularly high. Allegedly, that's because when rain hits the uncovered pile, which is about 5 percent salt, it washes the salt into the brook - which runs into the lake.

However, there are a number of other factors that could be influencing Lake Colby's chloride levels.

The Lake Colby watershed extends from Ampersand Avenue and the baseball field near Lower Saranac Lake over to the west side of Mount Pisgah.

"Anything that gets into the ground is going into the watershed," said Lee Keet, a member of the Lake Colby Association, a shoreowners' group. "The Lake Colby watershed is a fairly large bowl, and both the village and town garages are in that bowl."

"The height of land around (the watershed) would essentially mark the boundary for stormwater runoff," said John Sheehan, spokesman for the Adirondack Council, an environmental advocacy group that is threatening to sue the village by mid-August if it doesn't cover or move its sand pile.

Contaminants that enter the ground further from the lake have a better chance of getting filtered out in the soil before they reach the lake, Sheehan said.

Some village officials have said numerous times that they think road salt on state Route 86, part of which is also in the bowl and which runs parallel to Lake Colby for a section near Adirondack Medical Center, is partially to blame. This road is salted by the state Department of Transportation every winter, and the village's tests in September 2008 showed chloride levels of 49 parts per million near the Lake Colby Beach and 50 ppm near the hospital culvert. Both locations are near the highway.

By contrast, tests of the water in the middle of the lake in 2008 by the AWI showed an average of 39 ppm.

The town garage is not as close to a tributary as the village's; it is, however, in the watershed and close both to wetlands adjoining the lake and the lake itself.

Keet said he suspects the town's sand pile, which also contains salt, is contributing to chloride in the water as well, but "we just don't have any evidence, because we don't have the funds to do groundwater sampling."

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Septic contamination said to be unlikely

Leaky septic systems also contribute to high chloride levels; Keet said he thinks that is unlikely in this case, however.

"We do test," Keet said. "We cannot find any chloride coming from the residences. They're all modern systems, with possibly one exception I'm not familiar with. They're very high efficiency. We (the Keets) pump our septic waste about 300 feet, onto a leeching field I own, far from the lake."

The village sewer system ends at Lake Colby Beach. Colby Cottages is connected to it via a private hookup, and the people who live on the lake all have private septic systems. State law requires a septic system to leech at least 100 feet away from a lake; Keet said all the septic systems near Lake Colby exceed that standard.

AMC is on the village sewer system, with special pumping and backup systems that were installed about eight years ago, Keet said.

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Contact Nathan Brown at (518) 891-2600 ext. 26 or nbrown@adirondackdailyenterprise.com.