Wonder Lake dredging stops for the year

WONDER LAKE – During the summer, a barge with a white shelter sat on the west bay of Wonder Lake. The dredging machine had a cutter in the water to break-up sediment, was sucked out and pumped through a 1.5-mile-long tube to a former agricultural field.

On that field, sediment, which is 80 to 90 percent water, is in the process of drying out.

The machine has gone idle for the year, as temperatures have dropped to make dredging difficult.

"The pipeline is freezing up on them," said Master Property Owners Association President Dick Hilton said. "It’s pretty tough to push frozen water through a frozen pipeline."

In the first year of lake dredging, workers have dredged about two-thirds of west bay, Lake Manager Randy Stowe estimated.

A final amount of how much was dredged out this year has yet to be determined, Stowe said.

Contractors are being paid by volume, and have agreed to dredge out about 480,000 cubic yards of sediment as part of the project, which will continue in the spring, once temperatures allow, Stowe said.

Workers had hope to dredge more, but temperatures dropped sooner than hoped.

"We just weren't planning on winter to come a month early," Stowe said.

To pay for the work, the MPOA had issued $5.9 million in bonds to dredge the lake. Because lawsuits and extra engineering work during the permitting process, the MPOA had to raise about $2 million more through donations. The bonds are being paid back through property taxes in a special service area.

MPOA leaders are happy to see work finally underway.

"It feels very good to me, but I've only been involved in this process for six years," Stowe said. "I can't imagine what it feels like for life-long residents.... There's a lot of long-time lake people who are over the moon to see something finally happening and seeing progress."

Stowe said he understands the permit-issuing process needing to take a long time, but in a perfect world, work would have started two to three years earlier, when the economy was still struggling. Prices would have been better, he said.

"It is what it is, and we're working with what we have," Stowe said.

Toward the last couple weeks of work this year, workers were dredging 24 hours a day to get as much work done. But temperatures finally put an end to this year's operations, Hilton said.

Sediment over the years had washed into Wonder Lake from Nippersink Creek and from run-off from agricultural fields. It had made navigating the lake difficult in some areas.

“The agricultural community has gotten a pretty good handle on erosion control, because of whats been going on upstream, the amount of sediment that has been coming into the lake has been reduced by about two thirds from what it was 20 years ago,” Hilton said.

The average depth of the lake is about 7.5 feet, Hilton said. The deepest point is 14 to 16 feet. There are parts that are a foot deep.

In one part of the west bay, the depth was about a foot, before dredging took place. Now it's six feet. After finishing in one area, there were people who were able to dive off their piers, Hilton said.

“It is a lake community, not everyone who lives here looks at it as a lake community, but that’s what it is," Hilton said.

Just being allowed to go forward with dredging has been a long arduous process Hilton said.

The MPOA itself was formed in 1965, and the first order of business was figuring out how to dredge the lake.

There were efforts in the 1980s by volunteers, but a survey of residents showed people were against the effort.

This latest effort included professional help. Even after the SSA was formed and debt issued by the MPOA, there were people trying to stop the project.

There was a lawsuit filed by Thomas "T.P." Mathews, but a judge eventually ruled in favor of the MPOA going forward with the project.

The MPOA had to obtain permits from the Army Corps of Engineers, the Department of Natural Resources and the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency. Obtaining a permit from the IEPA took two years alone, Hilton said.

However, the final permit was issued on Oct. 11, 2013, and work on forming the sediment drying facility was started four days later.

Hilton said the MPOA hopes to be able to sell the dredged sediment, nicknamed "black gold."

"Someone can use it for potting soil, someone can use it to supplement existing agriculture fields, developing park properties," Hilton said.

"We have to dewater and let the sentiment dry out, and market it in someway and create more funds for more dredging," Hilton added.

This large investment will benefit the MPOA and lake residents, Hilton said.

"We think we will be able to handle any future maintenance dredging as a part of our normal budget rather than have to think about where are we going to find money to get this done," Hilton said.