Boat bound for Tahoe covered in quagga mussels
By Jeff Delong, Reno Gazette-Journal
Inspectors discovered a powerboat encrusted with quagga mussels during a routine roadside inspection Sunday, officials report.
Thirty-seven quagga mussels were found on the boat, which was repeatedly decontaminated before being released from the inspection station at Spooner Summit, said Pete Brumis, public outreach specialist with the Tahoe Resource Conservation District.
It was determined the vessel had been recently operated in Lake Mead, which is heavily infested with mussels.
I understand the boat owner was the person who informed the inspectors he’d been in Lake Mead. Congratulations to him for his honesty.
Honesty is one thing but if he had not been stopped at the inspection station he would have launched his ecologically deadly craft without giving it a second thought. If his boat was in Mead for the mussels to grow big enough to see the boat owner knew better than to even tow the boat all the way here without first killing the mussels down south.
The boat owner should be congratulated for their honesty about where the boat came from. They were inconvenienced by having their boat decontaminated and quarantined until the officials signed off on it being clean. They should have known that because their boat was in an infested body of water it needed to be decontaminated before it went anywhere. But from what I know, the boaters that leave contaminated bodies of water are not targeted for decontamination or education about the the invasive species that exist.
Every single boat that leaves Lake Mead or any other lake with mussels should be required to be decontaminated on site. How that should be funded, I don’t know. But our lake is one of the few in the region that offsets the cost of inspection and decontamination for the boat owner with user fees and public funding. protected.
If you want to use your boat in a body of water that is known to be infested with mussels, you should be responsible for making sure that your boat is not going to carry mussels to other lakes.
From a free market perspective, mussels are bad for everyone. The less bodes of water infested, the better. Every infested lake is a liability for everyone else. If any lake is infested, the users of the lake should know that it is infested, and assume the risk and cost for operating their boat (which is a potential vector of spread) in that body of water.
Every single boat that leaves Lake Mead should be decontaminated, at a shared cost for the owner and the general public that is threatened by the invasive species present in Lake Mead.
The spread of mussels is a financial liability to everyone. It increases the cost of water, which in The West, impacts every part of our economy.
Even if the spread of these mussels is inevitable (which is not he case), every year that a body of water is mussel free saves money.
Fact there’s not many boaters period this summer.
Great lost of cash for the lake people.
no mater what or who’s to blame.