Similar Lake Erie projects are also now in the pipeline in Cleveland, Toledo, Ashtabula and Lorain, Ohio. “Now, clean sediment is coming down the watershed into our dredged channels and we can think creatively about how to utilize this material,” said Andrew Hannes, a senior ecologist at the USACE in a recent interview.
In the summer of 2019, crews will construct what’s called a “hemi-marsh” on Unity Island: a shoreline wetland of native pond vegetation that grows in shallow water.
This approach allows the USACE to advance its core mission providing vital public engineering services while also aiding the ecosystem. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) – which oversees many of the nation’s dredging projects – is now finding alternate uses for the dredged material: supplementing urban parks, restoring coastal wetlands, stabilizing eroding waterfront, and reestablishing fisheries in lakes and ponds. So a new opportunity exists for reusing what used to be thought of as unusable.Īs I wrote in a recent article, “ The Changing Currents for Beneficial Reuse of Dredged Sediment ,” this practice is growing nationally and internationally. The Unity Island project is being carefully watched by scientists and engineers, as it is a first-of-its-kind project for the Great Lakes.īecause dredged sediment is now cleaner than it used to be – a result of the environmental standards enforced in recent decades – much of it is no longer required to be buried or stored in perpetuity. But now, that same dredged material is being beneficially reused as a part of the creation of new wildlife habitat on a river island between Buffalo and Niagara Falls. The gravel and silt dredged from the bottom of the Buffalo River used to be so contaminated that it had to be hauled off and buried at a special site.
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