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If Sisyphus had to work a pump instead of push a boulder uphill, his task might look like the one unfolding around Wapato Lake. There, local agencies work continuously to drain the lake by month’s end, only to see rainfall fill it up again.

“We spent five days pumping around the clock, making no progress,” said Mark Jockers, spokesman for Clean Water Services, the sewage treatment and watershed management agency serving Washington County. “We were just keeping up with the rain.”

Every February, a farmers collective called the Wapato Improvement District starts draining the lake, near the Yamhill County line south of Forest Grove, to prepare the land for crops. This year, however, the district’s main pump broke and the water level rose.

If too much water sits in the lake until summer, the water can get toxic. That happened in 2008, when the dike surrounding the lake breached, causing the lake to flood.

“They couldn’t empty it out until May or June, and the water they were emptying out was nasty,” Jockers said.

The district pumped that water into the nearby Tualatin River, the drinking water source for more than 400,000 people.

“We had to adjust the way we chemically treat water at the plant and install new equipment quickly,” said Willie Tiffany with the Joint Water Commission, the regional water agency. “It was a difficult and costly issue to deal with.”

No one wants to see that repeated, Jockers said. Clean Water Services is leading an effort to drain the lake into the Tualatin River before the weather warms, algae blooms and fish start dying.

Clean Water Services brought two trailer-mounted pumps of its own and wrangled another two from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The city of Portland lent one large trailer-mounted pump and a submersible pump.

Counting the improvement district’s small secondary pump, there are now seven pumps working to drain a lake that normally needs two. Clean Water Services is in a hurry, Jockers said, because of a district agreement with the state Department of Environmental Quality to finish pumping by April 30.

Because of the district’s broken pump, there’s a lot more water and a lot less time than usual. “Normally, they would have started pumping in February,” Jockers said. “But the first pump came on in March, and the most recent one came on last Wednesday.

“There’s 738 acres (of) lake area,” he said. “We have to peel off 1,500 to 2,000 acre-feet of water. And 5 inches of rain in six days didn’t help.”

The effort is far beyond what the improvement district can afford on its own, Jockers said. Agencies including Clean Water Services, the Joint Water Commission, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Special Districts Association of Oregon are splitting the cost.

The total bill still hasn’t been determined. But Tiffany remembers the cost of treating the water in 2008: nearly $300,000. And even after getting a powder-activated carbon-treatment system up and running quickly, the water still tasted and smelled strange.

Contributing money and staff time to avoid that scenario is a far better option, Tiffany said.

Officials at Portland’s Bureau of Environmental Services were more than happy to lend a new pump to the effort, said Mark Mitchell, collection system manager. The pump, which the agency bough a year and a half ago, sits by in case a winter flood occurs.

That flood period has passed, Mitchell said. “When (the pump) just sits dormant, we need to start it up and run it and exercise it anyway,” he said. “It’s good to get some run time on them.”

In addition, Clean Water Services has helped Portland, treating sewage flows at wholesale rates as Portland officials replace lines in the city’s system.

“We’re just trying to be a good neighbor,” Mitchell said. “It’s great to be able to share resources.”

Because of the weather, even the combined power of seven pumps might not get the lake drained in time. The DEQ could make an exception, however, said Avis Newell, the department’s Tualatin basin coordinator.

“It’s a little bit of an evolving situation and an unusual situation where there was not much precipitation all winter, and now we’re getting a lot,” Newell said. “If people would want to keep pumping starting May 1, maybe it’s feasible without causing a water quality issue.”