Boy Scout helps clean up Lake Bancroft

Lake Bancroft in Ishpeming has no inlets or outlets.

It’s been slowly filling in with organic sediment since the 1930s.

“My family has been living in Ishpeming for generations, and I just figured that it was time to give back to the community and clean up the lake,” Seth Brewer said.

Seth recently completed his freshman year at Westwood High School.

His Eagle Scout project involves Lake Bancroft, and he’s enlisted some additional helpers.

“The Boy Scouts are out here with some friends from the Westwood wrestling team,” Maureen LaWent of the Lake Bancroft Committee said. “They are clearing out willow debris around the lake, and this will help us so that when we start pumping the water through to take care of the nitrogen and the phosphorous in the water, we don’t have to worry about the extra.”

The volunteers on the Lake Bancroft Committee were thrilled when Seth told them he wanted to pitch in.

“We have been looking for an Eagle Scout candidate to help us, and to have him volunteer, this is just inestimately valuable,” LaWent said.

The next visible phase of the rejuvenation project at Lake Bancroft will get started in about another month.

The next step involves floc (floculent) logs, made of a food-grade chemical compound “that filters the water so, then, there’s polymer in the lake and it makes the suspended particles in the water settle (to the bottom)”, Brewer said.

Phase two of Seth’s Eagle Scout project will be to build a storage box for the logs on the lake’s shoreline.