Posted on September 1, 2020
MUSCATINE — In the week since the City of Muscatine dredge has been launched into the river for its latest round of cleaning, Director Jon Koch of the Water and Resource Recovery Facility is happy to report that things seem to be going well.
“We’ve got the large boat harbor and the opening to the harbor all cleaned out,” Koch said, “It’s hard to tell how much we’ve gotten at this point, but the bags are working well and we hope to be working on the rest of the harbor here in the next coming week or two.”
Koch promised they will continue to clean until sediment and debris is removed from the entire harbor. “We’ll move docks and clean underneath them. The entire harbor is scheduled to be cleaned this season.”
Koch said this process is done as needed. “If we have a year where it doesn’t fill up, then we don’t dredge. It also depends on how deep the river is, and it depends on what the core does to the dam systems.”
This year’s dredging operations came somewhat suddenly, because of the derecho storm. Last year, the city was unable to clean the harbor because of flooding. “We can’t dredge until it gets below 10 feet, because that’s where our hose hookup is, which is why we didn’t dredge earlier this year,” Koch explained.
After the storm the core water level of the river dropped almost three feet, bringing the crest of the Mississippi Rover in the Muscatine Boat Harbor and Marina to 7.6 feet. “That’s why a lot of boats were kind of getting stuck, because the core dropped the water levels dramatically within a few days. So then we had to get out there as fast as we could to try to get everything, but I think for the weekend, everybody should be able to get in and out no problem.
Koch said that the problems they are seeing are minor.
“We’re hitting lots of logs. They come down the river during the flood season, and you really can’t see them until you hit them,” he said, “so we end up hitting them and have to pull them up to get rid of them. It slows us down quite a bit, but that’s how we get it all cleaned out.”
There were also hose blowouts earlier in the week, and some issues with the start-up, but Koch said after not dredging for a while, these were typical obstacles that were to be expected and could quickly be dealt with.
Looking ahead to the coming week, Koch expected the rest of the project and the dredging season to run smoothly. “The dredge is working well, really the hardest thing out there is keeping my crew cool,” he said, “It’s very hard to work out there all day in the sun. But they’re doing a great job, we’re keeping everything moving and we’re going really fast.”
Koch expressed his appreciation for the people of Muscatine during dredge set-up. “There were a lot of things to fix on the dredge to get it going, so we appreciate everybody being patient and knowing that we were working as hard as we could to get things going as fast as we could. We’re just going to keep on keeping on.”
Source: muscatinejournal
