The Adobe Flash Player is required to view this multimedia interactive. Get it here.

Expert says dredging St. Mary's lake would take 2 to 2½ years

‘We’ve never dealt with something like you have there,’ says exec with 30-plus years experience.

A dredge recently completed dredging the west end of Clear Lake in Ventura, Iowa. The project involved dredging approximately 2.3 million cubic yards of sediment and disposing it within three confined disposal facilities located approximately three miles from the dredge site. The sediments on the Clear Lake project were sand and silts from an accumulation of years of agricultural runoff.

ENLARGE PHOTO

Water rescues prompt warning from health officials
5/25/12
Beach Waterpark sued for failure to deliver
5/25/12
Raleigh Trammell’s defense opens in felony trial
5/25/12
Man not wearing life jacket when he drowns in Caesar Creek Lake
5/25/12
UD to move satellite campus to Dublin
5/25/12
> More headlines

By William Hershey, Columbus Bureau Updated 12:44 AM Monday, August 9, 2010

COLUMBUS — Large-scale dredging to help restore Grand Lake St. Marys to health could be completed within two to two-and-a-half years, according to Larry Matteson Jr., vice president of an Iowa-based company with more than 30 years of dredging experience.

At the invitation of state Rep. Jim Zehringer, R-Fort Recovery, Matteson recently visited the 13,500-acre lake, currently shut down to all activities because of an environmental crisis caused by a toxic bacteria outbreak.

L.W. Matteson, Inc., located in Burlington on the Mississippi River, has removed millions of cubic yards of material from oceans, lakes and rivers. The massive problems at Grand Lake St. Marys, located in Auglaize and Mercer counties about 60 miles north of Dayton, are different, said Matteson.

“We’ve never dealt with something like you have there,” said Matteson.

Dredging is addressed in a plan adopted by Gov. Ted Strickland to clean up the lake.

“Unfortunately, dredging is the most expensive of all lake restoration practices with some estimates for dredging all of Grand Lake reaching as high as $90 million,” the plan says.

Mike Shelton, spokesman for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, said that’s nearly three times the $34 million a year that state parks now get from the state budget’s general fund.

Strickland’s plan, however, acknowledges the merits of dredging.

“Removal of the phosphorous-enriched layer of sediment on the bottom of the lake through suction dredging is probably the most permanent solution to reduce internal phosphorous loading,” the plan says.

Zehringer, whose district includes most of the lake, said that it’s important to establish a dredging plan that could be phased in.

“I would like to see some sort of funding secured over the winter,” said Zehringer. Work could then start in the spring, he said.

Matteson said the dredging project envisioned by Zehringer would cover from 4,000 to 5,000 acres of the lake. Matteson declined to estimate how much it would cost.

“The most time-consuming part of the project is acquiring and building the disposal areas,” Matteson said.

Possibilities would include using the sediment for islands in the lake, Zehringer and Shelton said.

Dredging would attack one of two issues — internal loading from phosphorous and other nutrients now in the lake sediment.

Other parts of the state plan would attack the second issue — nutrients running into the lake from feeder creeks, especially during period of heavy rain and snow melt.

The lake now has fluctuating levels of cyanobacteria that produce neurotoxins that can affect the brain and nervous system plus hepatoxins that affect the liver.

While the state plan ultimately would ban farmers in the Grand Lake St. Marys watershed from applying manure to their fields in the winter, the prohibition would be phased in over two years to allow farmers to develop manure storage areas.

Contact this reporter at (614) 224-1608 or whershey@DaytonDailyNews.com.

Share this article