Getting the Muck Out

I promised to write more about the muck, so today's post is all about muck. The first order of business in restoring the stream is to remove all the material that has accumulated on the bottom so we can create a more natural stream bed. If you have pulled out a branch that was stuck in this muck, you know that the stuff is sticky, gooey, and often smelly. The smell is from the decomposition that happens in an environment without oxygen (anaerobic decomposition). While there is some oxygen in the water, there wasn't much in the muck. But as I mentioned the other day, the muck doesn't smell. We let it dry out for a few days before we started removing it, and it appears that the drying got enough oxygen into the material to stop the anaerobic decomposition. This was really good news and has made this phase much more pleasant than it otherwise might have been.

We are spreading the muck in the undeveloped part of the Nature Center south of Willow Street. You can see it as you drive by from the eastbound lanes. The pile is about 4 feet high and covers about a half of an acre (as of this writing). Unless my math is bad, that's nearly 1,000 cubic yards. Later on, some of this might be mixed with sandy soil and recycled into the new stream banks.