USA: Officials to Unveil Twelve Mile Creek Restoration Plan

Officials with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will hold a meeting on December 1 in Pickens to lay out further testing and restoration plans for Twelve Mile Creek.

It has been thirty-five years since polychlorinated biphenyls were first discovered in Hartwell Lake and its fish declared unsuitable for consumption what triggered efforts to restore the lake and a major tributary, Twelve Mile Creek.

Local biologist Larry Dyck stated that a Superfund site along the Hudson River in Upstate New York has incorporated dredging flood plains where the contaminant was detected.

“In a nutshell, it’s appropriate that we at least know whether the many hundreds of acres of flood plain along the Twelve Mile River are a problem for people who live along or use the river,” the biologist said.

EPA project manager Craig Zeller tends to bring in a Corps of Engineers expert on sediment flows to explain how the creek’s currently exposed banks may need to be stabilized.

“The reason we are re-evaluating it is the conditions there have changed considerably since we last looked at it in the mid-1990s,” Zeller said.

[mappress]

Dredging Today Staff, November 23, 2011;