Lake Linganore water is used as the primary source of drinking water for the City of Frederick and is the emergency back-up water supply for Frederick County. It currently holds over 500-million gallons of water, nearly a four-month drinking water supply for the City of Frederick. The lake water comes from a ~80-square mile watershed roughly bounded by Mount Airy to the southeast, Taylorsville to the northeast, Libertytown to the northwest and New Market to the southwest. Water enters the lake through the two primary tributaries, Linganore Creek and Ben’s Branch, and leaves via the dam’s spillway at an average rate of more than 600 gallons per second, a flow that would fill an Olympic swimming pool in less than 20 minutes. While the Lake Linganore private community holds title to the land beneath and around the water, the water itself is public property. Members of the Lake Linganore community have been enjoying the waters of Lake Linganore for swimming, boating, fishing and other recreational purposes for decades.
Since Linganore Creek was dammed to create the lake in 1972, agricultural management practices in the Lake Linganore watershed have improved to help reduce harmful chemical applications to crops / fields and minimize livestock encroachment in tributaries and control run-off. Despite these better agriculture management practices, population growth has added new stresses to the environment and there continues to be room for further improvement of Lake Linganore water quality much like many freshwater lakes.
The lake is located in a county that is a leader in agricultural land use and milk production and in a state where agriculture is the largest commercial industry and the largest single land use. Lake Linganore likely is no exception to the United State Environmental Protection Agency’s (USEPA’s) 2000 findings from a study of the nation’s lakes that agriculture is the most wide-spread source of damage to lake quality. Algae nutrients and sedimentation were listed in the USEPA study as the top identified pollutants and stressors to U.S. freshwater lakes. Because of the agricultural land use of the Lake Linganore watershed and lake water quality observations, LLA Committee, Friends of the Lake, and its’ Water Quality (WQ) subcommittee, has been focused on three main water quality aspects: algae nutrients; sedimentation; and bacteria.
