OTISCO LAKE WATER

Onondaga County Water Authority (OCWA) uses Otisco Lake together with Lake Ontario to provide drinking water throughout the county.  Visit Otisco Lake as a Drinking Water Source for a detailed description of this process. To review the Otisco Dam and its role with OCWA, please visit the  Dam Update site.

Note:  Otisco Lake provides  15  out of 19  towns in Onondaga drinking water, including Syracuse!

This table is from: http://www.ocwa.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Page-4-5-Water-Source-Map-and-Legend.pdf

Water Quality Information

For more information on the quality of the water and other learning resources, pleaseit the pages and and review the brochures below!

Hobart William Smith hosts Finger Lakes Research Conference

A well planned day of knowledgeable speakers enlightened over 100 attending scientists, researchers and community partners to this years Finger Lakes Research Conference.  Ten half hour sessions covered a variety of topics such as : Fisheries management, Wastewater Treatment findings of pharmaceuticals and microplastics; Benefits to Round Goby, Spread of Starry Stonewort, Agricultural programs to protect watersheds. HABS, Mercury concentrations in Food Webs,  and Integrated Watershed Management.  As an added bonus an hour was provided to discuss over a dozen prepared educational posters by a variety of scientists.

DEC Otisco Lake representative Dr. Lewis McCaffrey presented a poster at this years Finger Lakes Annual Research Conference held November 17 shown to the left.  He was able to compare presence of zebra and quagga mussels in three Finger Lakes.  Note the center of his  poster which compares Owasco, Skaneateles and Otisco Lakes and the finding of muscles their density at a variety of depths.  

Dr. McCaffrey stated that "these muscles have been implicated in the promotion of toxic microcystis blooms and increase in soluble reactive phosphorous proportion and so their absence, presence, number and biomass is of importance to the control of HABS in the Finger Lakes".