Lake Regency Needs Patch
By Chip Olsen, Omaha World-Herald, Neb.
Apr. 1–A privately owned lake in one of Omaha’s most widely known upscale neighborhoods is losing water.
The level of Lake Regency is noticeably lower than its average depth of 8 feet, a member of the Regency Homeowners Association board said.
“I would say right now that it’s probably down two feet from normal,” Steve Olson said.
The slow drain of an estimated 75 gallons of water per minute was first noticed at the end of 2007, according to Morgan Properties of King of Prussia, Pa., which owns the lake. The company also owns Regency Lakeside Apartments. The apartments and the lake are just north of Pacific Street and west of Regency Parkway.
The problem is expected to be repaired this week, now that an engineer has figured out the source of the leak.
Omaha-based engineering firm HDR determined that the lake was losing 75 gallons of water a minute, said Jerry Sherman, president of the Regency homeowners association.
Kevin Jackson, a construction engineer and homeowners association board member, said he thinks the water is seeping into the soil, then draining into a storm sewer on the west side of the lake. The storm sewer empties into the Big Papillion Creek, which runs along the west side of the lake.
Sherman said a local contractor will be hired to make the repairs.
Dirt and a kind of clay called bentonite will be added on the west side of the lake to address the problem, he said. The clay will expand as it absorbs water.
Michael Duncan, regional manager of Morgan Properties, said this is the first time the lake has had this type of problem. When needed, apartment officials add water to the lake from the Metropolitan Utilities District.
Sherman said the water level normally drops 6 to 8 inches a year. He became aware of the problem in January when an MUD bill was much higher than normal. Sherman said the water bill is normally $5,000 a year. He declined to say how much the latest bill was.
The homeowners association and Morgan Properties share responsibility for maintaining the lake.
The T.H. Maenner Co. developed the sprawling Regency area in the late 1960s and early ’70s on more than 450 acres of farmland.
Construction of the crescent-shaped body of water began in 1968 in what was a cornfield. Eighty-five million gallons of water was used to fill the lake.
An official of the Papio-Missouri River Natural Resources District said 75 gallons of water a minute is a relatively small amount of water flowing out of the lake and into the creek.
Assistant General Manager Marlin Petermann said that losing water at that rate would cause a lake of the size of Lake Regency to drop about 3 feet every 100 days.
“That’s pretty slow,” he said.
That amount of water wouldn’t be noticeable coming into the creek, either, he said. At any given time, 100 cubic feet of water per second is flowing into the Papio Creek, which is roughly equal to 48,000 gallons per minute.
World-Herald researcher Jeanne Hauser contributed to this report.
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