Play in Some Virtual Mud

Baton Rouge's LSU Lakes, in actuality a series of six lakes strung loosely together between the LSU campus and City-Brooks Community Park, are disappearing. It is a the flip side of the "football-field-a-day" problem that plagues the Louisiana coast, with natural and man-made forces conspiring to fill in these beloved bodies of water: water-loss instead of land-loss. 

Once upon a time, the lakes were mosquito-infested swamps, dredged into lakes as a stipulation of their donation to LSU in 1933. That they are not natural lakes, however, poses a problem now, since runoff from Bayou Duplantier and high phosphorus loads emptied from surrounding lawns is causing them to revert back to swampland. Healthy lakes should be at least five feet deep; the average depth of the LSU Lakes is a little more than two-and-a-half feet.

Destination: The Lakes, an initiative of the Baton Rouge Area Foundation (BRAF), was launched this spring to address the problem. In June, following a request for proposals that attracted fifteen submissions from national and local landscape design firms, SWA Group, in association with Jeffrey Carbo Landscape Architects, was hired to complete a master plan to save and improve the LSU Lakes.

This Thursday, BRAF will host a meeting to which the public is invited to play in some virtual mud. On December 11 from 6 pm to 8 pm, the LSU Student Union Cotillion Ballroom will be the site of a collective re-imagination of the parks that surround the LSU Lakes; attendees will work in groups to suggest solutions for relocating dredged materials removed in the process of reestablishing the lakes' depths.

The meeting will be the second of four public meetings hosted by BRAF; the third is planned for January 29, when the planners will present their overall design. Prospective attendees should RSVP at BatonRougeLakes.org.