Whenever Rita Peloquin comes to McAlester she goes by the little pond at Oak Hill Cemetery. It’s a peaceful scene, with ducks and geese lounging on the banks or swimming past turtles poking their heads through the surface of the water. She often sees children fishing at the pond, their eyes alight with joy as they pull in a Bluegill or some other type of fish.

Peloquin often enjoys going by, getting out of her car and walking around the area. With six children of her own, she finds she needs a little quiet time every now and then and a stop by the little cemetery pond whenever she’s in town gives her just what she needs.

Usually.

Wednesday it didn’t.

The Indianola resident sensed something different as soon as she got out of her car Wednesday afternoon. Something just … not right. As she drew nearer the pond, she saw what was different.

“There were dead fish everywhere,” she said. “They’d just all floated up to the top and they were all over.”

Little fish, fairly large fish, sunfish, catfish, carp — dead. Some floated off down a little overflow stream leading from the pond. Ducks and turtles were feasting on others.

“Everything seemed to be all right around the pond,” Peloquin said. “The ducks and turtles were fine, but all the fish were dead.

“Maybe there was a lightning strike in the storm? I don’t know. It was kind of a freak thing.”

Cemetery Sexton Russell Clifton said he and his crew were aware of the dead fish. “We used the cemetery crew to pick them all up and dispose of them,” he said.

Clifton said crews had not been using weed killer or fertilizer at the cemetery so it wasn’t likely that those types of chemicals had run off into the pond because of recent rains.

He had samples of the pond water tested to see if tests could determine what caused the fish to die.

The sample showed that a city water line was leaking into the pond, since chlorine and fluoride were detected in it, Clifton said.

But Marley Beem, an extension specialist with Oklahoma State University, said that the water leak might not be the reason for the fish kill. “It’s possible, but that’s not necessarily the cause,” he said. “It depends on how strong the chlorine is.”

Water leaving the city’s water treatment plant usually has a chlorine reading of 1 to 2 parts per million, said Assistant City Engineer Dave Medley. That’s a level that can be toxic to aquarium fish.

But unless there was a large influx of treated water into the pond, it shouldn’t have injured the fish, Beem said, since the chlorine would diffuse into the untreated water.

“Fish kills are always sudden and they’re always a little mysterious,” he said. However, they’re not uncommon.

Usually fish kills happen in the fall, but they have been known to happen at other times of year. The most common cause is when algae, microscopic plants, die for some reason. The death of the plants depletes the oxygen level in the water, causing fish to basically suffocate. Another reason is simple overpopulation, when a pond’s food or oxygen supply is not great enough to support the number of fish in it.

“These types of incidents are not uncommon,” Beem said.

Contact Doug Russell at drussell@mcalesternews.com.