By Greg Forester, Staff Writer
WEST WINDSOR — Portions of Community Park along Big Bear Brook are being prepared as a storage area for thousands of pounds of materials set to be dredged from Grovers Mill Pond in the late summer and fall, Mayor Shing-Fu Hsueh said Wednesday.
Barbed wire fencing and construction vehicles are the first visible signs of the $4.6 million project, which seeks to restore the pond’s ecological health after it became compromised, as a result of sediments filling in the pond and an overabundance of vegetation clogging the surface.
Select Transportation Inc. of Ohio was handed a contract for the project, which is being conducted under the supervision of the Army Corps of Engineers’ Philadelphia office. The Corps of Engineers has agreed to pick up most of the cost, with West Windsor Township paying around $1.7 million out of the total $4.6 million.
Once the operation begins, a dredge boat will suck the materials out of the bottom of the pond. The boat will carry a tube-like apparatus that operates like a souped-up vacuum cleaner, according to Community Development Coordinator Pat Ward.
She said that the shallow depth of the pond — only two to three feet in some places — will require the use of a flat-bottomed boat to carry the dredging apparatus around the pond.
The mouth of the waterlogged vacuum cleaner uses grinding blades and suction to chop up pond materials and suck them out through a system of tubes, to be discharged into the waiting containment area in Community Park.
The process is known as wet dredging, versus dry dredging, which involves draining a body of water and digging out materials in the open air, Ms. Ward said.
The actual dredging will begin around the end of August and continue until November, with the three-month window coming as a requirement due to some of the different organisms in Grovers Mill Pond’s ecosystem, and the area around it.
Materials removed from the floor of the pond will be required to remain on the Community Park site for a full year, which will allow water to drain back into nearby waterways and also provide an appropriate waiting time to begin conducting testing of the material.
”It will be tested for arsenic and other chemicals that have been used as pesticides by farmers over the last hundred years,” Mayor Hsueh said.
With satisfactory test results the materials could be used as topsoil or put to other uses, Mayor Hsueh said.
