Posted on March 29, 2018
By Stephen Rappaport, The Ellsworth American
The glaciers took eons to create the inner harbor in Blue Hill. The Army Corps of Engineers’ plans to dredge an all-tide channel from the harbor mouth to the town dock may take only slightly less time to complete, and the cost is going up.
Last week, Army Corps project manager Bill Bartlett met with selectmen at a sparsely attended public meeting to announce that the town would have to come up with an additional $15,000 for its share of the costs of a long-running study of the feasibility of dredging a 2,500-foot all-tide channel from the inner harbor town wharf to deep water, more or less off the end of Peters Point.
The Corps has been looking at the possibility of all-tide access for Blue Hill since at least 1948, but with little to show for its interest. The project took on new life about nine years ago, and picked up more impetus after the town completed a substantial rehabilitation of the decrepit wharf six years ago.
In 2012, the Army Engineers completed a hydrographic survey of Blue Hill Harbor and, in October 2013, delivered a feasibility study reporting that the project would require the removal of about 62,000 cubic yards of silt and sand from the harbor bottom. The cost of the study, initially estimated to be $160,000, was shared 50/50 between the town and the federal government, as was another $18,000 paid for testing after contaminants were found in the harbor mud.
According to Bartlett, the original $160,000 estimated cost of the study was based on the assumption that the harbor was clean and that material removed during dredging could be disposed of “without problems” by dumping them at an ocean site about 11 miles southeast of Blue Hill.
The discovery that the harbor bottom is contaminated with polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, presumably from an accumulation of diesel fuel spilled into the water over many years, has increased the project cost again, Bartlett said.
Because ocean dumping isn’t possible and the cost of trucking the contaminated dredge spoils to an onshore disposal site would be prohibitive, the Corps wants to use a confined aquatic disposal cell, essentially a big pit in the harbor bottom, to get rid of the dirty dirt. The contaminated spoils would be covered by about 3 feet of clean fill material dredged from uncontaminated areas of the channel project.
The preliminary study and design of the “CAD cell,” a 100-by-470-foot pit lying some 200 to 300 feet east of the end of Cemetery Point and covered by 2 to 3 feet of water at low tide, will cost $30,000, Bartlett said, with the town responsible for 50 percent. The selectmen have scheduled a vote on a request for those funds at the upcoming Town Meeting.
That won’t be the last of the town’s financial responsibility if the dredging project is finally approved.
The current cost estimate for the project is $2.1 million, of which the town’s share is 20 percent. Half that sum would be payable when the town and the Corps sign a “project partnership agreement” with the balance payable over 20 years. Even the first payment won’t likely be due soon.
According to Bartlett, once the CAD cell study and report are complete it would take another four to six months before the final project partnership agreement was signed and the first 10 percent payment was due. After that, the final “project engineering design” could take another year to complete before the project — which would probably take one season to build — was ready to go out to bid.
Added up, that means completion is “three to four years ahead,” Bartlett said.
Source: The Ellsworth American
