Archive for the ‘Arcadia’s Edge’ tag
Roper Pond (Lily Pond), 6837 Trenholm Road (at Arcadia Lakes): Summer 2010 14 comments
8 July 2010:
13 May 2010:
Well, it looks like the lily pond on Trenholm Road just up from the Arcadia Lakes town hall is gone.
This pond has been a pleasant sight from Trenholm for years, with its almost total cover of lily pads and an old rustic dock on the far side. In the last year or so, it has also been the source of some controversy. It seems a developer has bought the property and wants to build apartments on it. That will require a catchment basin, so he planned to dredge the existing pond to the necessary depth. Since lily pads need shallow water, that would have put paid to them. When word of the plan got out, he apparently was sued by a number of local residents to stop the dredging.
Personally, I'm of two minds about that. I hate to see the pond go, but I have some sympathy for a guy who thought he had jumped through all the hoops and then gets hit with unexpected legal trouble.
However, the really strange thing is that, at least according to The State, in the actual event, nobody seems to know why the water levels in the pond fell. Now, that report is from 15 May (just after I took my first pictures of the pond), so there may have been a determination since then, but that just strikes me as very odd.
The first day I was there, 13 May 2010, there was a guy in a john boat fooling with the concrete "stopper' for the pond. Given what I had read about the controversy, I just assumed he was there to "pull the plug", but perhaps he was simply trying to figure out what was going on. At any rate, on that day, I could see that the water levels were down from the norm by looking around the edges of the pond, and it just got worse every time I went back after that.
By 27 May, the water levels were low enough that you could walk to the "stopper", and on my final (so far) visit on 8 July, most of the pond was dry (except for a small watercourse leading to the stopper) and almost all of the lily pads were dead. At some point, the dock seems to have been partially torn down as well. The back area (where presumably the spring or stream enters the pond) is still very green, and I saw a heron walking around back there, but the front is totally gone.