Posted on April 4, 2017
The massive PCB clean-up in the Fox River is now entering the home stretch, with dredging operations underway for a ninth consecutive year.
An early ice-out this spring allowed for a two-week jump start on the largest river clean-up of its kind in U.S. history.
Since 2009, crews have dredged more than 4 million cubic yards of PCB- contaminated sediment covering a 13-mile stretch of the lower Fox River.
With just over a mile to go, operations now move into downtown Green Bay, which poses some safety concerns.
“We’ll be running into a lot more commercial traffic and things like that as the project moves downstream so we’re working with the Coast Guard and the DNR wardens and the Green Bay and Brown County boat patrols to make sure everybody is safe on the river, we try to tell people that it’s like a road construction zone, pay attention to those signs, slow down,” says Scott Stein, Fox River Clean-Up Project Spokesman.
Boaters must also pay close attention for diver flags in the water and steer clear.
“They’ll be doing some locating for utilities, but also some diver-assisted dredging near the utilities so that it’s done safely in those areas, it’s one thing when a boat is damaged or whatever, but when you have somebody in the water you’re talking human life there,” says Stein.
Stein says dredging operations will run through November and push closer to the mouth of the river.
He says sampling and testing will then determine if 2018 will be the 10th and final year of the $750 million river clean-up.
“A lot of it depends on the material that we find, sometimes the material slows down the dredging and it varies from place to place on the river,” says Stein.
Source: abc2WBAY.com
