What makes a lake one of the 11 deadliest lakes in the United States? The question has a variety of possible answers. Boating and other popular recreational activities are not closely monitored by anyone other than the area tourism board — you don’t need a license to drive a boat, though you usually need to register any boat that you own. Boating goes hand in hand with alcohol in a lot of cases, and though it’s illegal to drink and drive a boat in all 50 states, most boaters can count on one hand the number of Coast Guard or other enforcement vehicles they’ve seen in their entire boating lives.
Boaters also face a number of challenges that we never have from inside our cars. There are no “rules of the road” for boats, nor any clear established routes to take. Sheltered harbor areas like the furthest tendrils of the Lake of the Ozarks have no-wake zones, but many boaters ignore this simple rule. People boat without enough life jackets or without wearing those life jackets. They pull tubes or water skiers and create more variables for other boaters to try to negotiate. Driving a boat is a complex responsibility that is, perhaps, not taken as seriously as it should be.
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Many larger bodies of water — the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, maybe, or the Mississippi River — have clearly marked channels of deeper, safer water to show boaters where they can open up the throttle and go faster. Besides speed, this has safety ramifications: like a tall semi-truck tractor trailor, a boat with a deep hull can’t simply drive wherever it likes. It will get stuck on mudbanks, hit underwater obstacles like sunken boats or trees, or even hit the very barriers that define the deep water channel. Lakes can have fewer of these careful and highly visible guideposts.
Besides the logistical dangers for those boating on major lakes in the United States, there is enormous pollution all over the country. The Environmental Protection Agency has a special category for the most polluted places, designated “Superfund sites” by the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980. Out of hundreds of Superfund sites, relatively few include or border lakes, but pollution can easily spread through groundwater, streams, and other modes to contaminate lakes. Most of the 11 most dangerous lakes in the world are deadly for their pollution.
Polluted lakes offer a special kind of danger, because while people in the United States don’t typically find their own way into the groundwater supply or drink directly from local streams, lakes are centers of tourism and local recreational activities. On a hot summer day, it’s a fool’s errand to stop citizens from visiting the beach and trying to swim, especially if the beach is private property. People may know they should only boat on a lake instead of swimming in it, but that willpower only lasts so long, and what if people fall in by accident?
All that is to say . . . The overall list of deadliest lakes includes a variety of criteria. Where did the lake fall on the U.S. Coast Guard’s 2001 report on rates of boating accidents? Is the lake an EPA Superfund site, and for how long? Is the lake in the news for pollution or boating danger? What do local law enforcement and other officials have to say? Let’s take a look.
11. Onondaga Lake, New York
Once ignobly hailed as the most polluted lake in the nation, Onondaga Lake is making a slow but steady comeback thanks to the EPA. Listed as a Superfund site in 1994, the lake drew attention not just for its history of industrial pollution but for its potential to spill that pollution all over the nearby water system and residential areas. The cocktail of pollution ranged from mercury and pesticides to good old fashioned human sewage. Between 2012 and 2014 alone, the EPA’s designated “responsible parties” — those who polluted the lake — dredged and removed 2.2 million cubic yards of contamination from the lakebed.
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10. Lake Washington, Washington
Once the site of a plant that manufactured creosote — an especially sticky petrochemical — the southeastern shore of Lake Washington has since served as a storage site for even more cancer-causing fossil-fuel swill. The lake occupies prime real estate in the middle of the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue metro area, so there are two beaches near the dumping site, not to mention habitats for animals like threatened Chinook salmon and bald eagles. It was listed as a Superfund site in 2006.
9. Devil’s Swamp Lake, Louisiana
Just 10 miles from Baton Rouge, you’ll find the aptly named Devil’s Swamp Lake, a proposed Superfund site since 2004 and a rich source of cancer-causing polychlorinated biphenyls — say that five times fast — that were banned in 1979. The Louisiana Department of Health said in 2009 that the water was not hazardous to the public, but advised in 2015 that people should not swim in or have contact with the lake or eat any fish or crawfish from it. Mixed messages.
8. Lake Erie
Lake Erie is the second-most dangerous Great Lake in terms of sudden drowning by currents — about 2 deaths per year, compared with about 6 for Lake Michigan. But Lake Erie also has a huge algae problem, causing both a large “dead zone” where no fish can survive and a drinking-water crisis in Toledo that’s made national news. Eleven million people rely on Lake Erie for drinking water, the most of any of the 11 deadliest lakes in the United States.
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7. Lake Pleasant, Arizona
Manmade Lake Pleasant is the centerpiece of a popular boating and fishing destination near Phoenix. Its primary danger is in boating accidents, where it made the top 15 most dangerous bodies of water in the nation according to the U.S. Coast Guard. Local officials regularly caution boaters not to drink and drive and to be sure they have enough life jackets. And carbon monoxide is a risk anytime many boats gather in one place with their engines running.
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6. Lake Mohave, Arizona-Nevada
This Colorado River reservoir is the first of several narrow, twisting manmade lakes that made the list of 11 deadliest lakes in the United States. Created by a 1944 treaty, Lake Mohave is a huge recreational draw in the region, offering better SCUBA diving than most inland bodies of water could ever hope to. The damming process lowered the water temperature and endangered or relocated some species. As with Lake Pleasant, Lake Mohave’s danger lies in boating accidents.
5. Lake Havasu, Arizona
Very like Lake Mohave, Lake Havasu is a winding, manmade reservoir designed and built to help control and allocate drinking water from the Colorado River. The lake is surrounded by state parks and refuge sites but still draws enough fishing and boating tourism to create dangerous amounts of lake traffic.
4. Lake Michigan
Lake Michigan is the most dangerous of the Great Lakes. An average of six people per year are drowned by strong lake currents, and a total of 20 have drowned in the lake so far in 2015 — Lake Erie is second again with 12 total drowning deaths in 2015. A number of Superfund sites have existed along the lake, especially the industrial lakefront of the greater Chicagoland area. Ten million people rely on Lake Michigan for drinking water.
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3. Lake Powell, Utah-Arizona
Another manmade reservoir on the Colorado River — but not the last in the countdown — Lake Powell is saddled with a high number of boating accidents. Officials in Arizona have named factors like falling water levels, since the same number of boaters in a smaller area of lake will have a higher chance of crashing. And because these Arizona lakes are both created by dams and regulated by international agreements, there’s no way to avoid lowering the water level if it’s needed.
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2. Lake Mead, Nevada-Arizona
Bearing the dubious distinction of most dangerous among Arizona’s five of the 11 deadliest lakes in the United States, Lake Mead is also the largest manmade reservoir in the country. It was created by gigantic Hoover Dam, whose construction cost 100 lives of its own in the 1930s. Boating accidents are rampant in Lake Mead, and the Colorado River as a whole had more boating accidents than the Atlantic Ocean coast.
1. Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri
Lake of the Ozarks sounds a lot like the other most dangerous lakes: it’s a manmade reservoir, in this case created by a damn on the Osage River. Visitors are often treated to the spectacle of water being drained in torrents from the reservoir side of the dam to adjust the water level after strong rains. The lake is made of hundreds of tiny fingers that extend into the rolling hills, creating countless blind intersections for boaters. Between 1993 and 2003, 33 people were killed in lake accidents — in a total area less than one third of one percent the size of Lake Michigan.
Whether these lakes are polluted or just overcrowded, they’re all part of the 11 deadliest lakes in the United States. But all of this information should be taken with a grain of salt — any lake can be dangerous, and many of these lakes are among the most popular in the nation for tourism and boating fun. Always check your local water conditions before you plan an outing, especially if there has been severe weather in your area. Be careful and mindful as you go boating or swimming in your favorite local lake.
