On an Indian summer day in the Northeast Kingdom, it's hard to believe that a pond named Ticklenaked could ever look unappealing.

"Towards the end of the year the pond develops a green scum. It's not harmful but it's not attractive”, said Tim Wilson, a resident who lives by the pond year round.

Ticklenaked Pond is a 54-acre lake determined to be impaired by phosphorous; which is the element responsible for feeding algae blooms that appear in the warm summer months.

"The issue with the high levels of phosphorous is that a lot of algae grows and the visibility in the lake is poor. So for example you can only see 5 or 6 feet deep into the water,  and sometimes as low as  even 3 feet. It's not very pleasant to swim in and it also has impacts on the ecology of the lake as well” says Ben Copans, who is the watershed coordinator at the Department of Natural Resources.

For the most part, the algae blooms have no harmful affects to people, but they take up the oxygen that other species and fish need to live.

" The growth of algae creates dead spots in the lake, in other words the growth of algae takes up all the oxygen leaving none for other species of plant and fish", said Wilson.

This plant might not be taking oxygen away from humans , but its foul appearance has forced some to find another place to swim.

" There’s a public beach at the north end of the lake, and it’s perfectly safe to swim there. But there has been a decline in its use, and I think some of it has to do with the appearance of the water", said Wilson, who is also a member of the Ticklenaked Pond Association, a group formed by residents to make a difference for their homeland.

After 10 years of water testing, answers as to why this problem occurs are surfacing. They include farmland runoff and sediments that lie on the bottom of the lake.

“It took 5 or 6 years of those studies to understand how much of the phosphorus is coming in from the watershed and how much was coming up from the sediments”, said Copans, who has been actively visiting the watershed at Ticklenaked.

Over the past few years a total maximum daily load has been put together for the lake. That’s a document required by the Environmental Protection Agency as part of a cleanup plan for the lake.

The TMDL articulates the maximum permissible load of any given pollutant that can enter the lake and still meet the state’s water quality standards.

Once the EPA approves this document, the cleanup can begin.

For information about Vermont's water quality standards you can visit www.vtwaterquality.org.