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Faith: So Matt, you work for Ozaukee
County, and you've had a lot of agencies
involved with this project. Can you give
us some background on how this project
was set up?
Matt: Sure. The Thiensville-Mequon
fishway, which allows fish to bypass the
elevation change here at the
Thiensville-Mequon Dam, is one part of a
larger Ozaukee County managed project.
We received funding in 2009 from the
American Recovery and Reinvestment Act
through the National Oceanic &
Atmospheric Administration of about $4.7
million to increase fish passage
throughout the Milwaukee River
watersheds, specifically in Ozaukee
County. The Thiensville-Mequon Dam is
the most downstream barrier in Ozaukee
County on the main stem of the Milwaukee River to fish movement.
So by building this fishway, again, it
allows fish to navigate around the dam
and then access high quality habitat
areas. In Ozaukee County tributary
streams, we know that habitats do exist
on these streams. It's just a matter of
allowing fish to access them. We have
some folks here from the Milwaukee River
Community Service Corp. They are
volunteering for us today to kind of
tweak various elements of the fishway.
What this fishway is is it's a naturally
meandering stream, or it's engineered to
approximate a natural meandering stream
channel, and it incorporates a series of pools and riffles.
The pools are still flat calm areas that
allow fish to kind of recharge their
batteries so to speak, conserve their
energy, and then expend their energy as
they navigate through the faster moving
shallower riffle areas. And we're
working on three barriers on the main
stem of the Milwaukee River; the
Thiensville-Mequon Dam is one of those.
We have the Lime Kiln Dam located
upstream in the village of Grafton,
which we're currently removing, and then
finally we have the Bridge Street Dam
also in the village of Grafton. We'll be
building a fishway around the eastside
of that dam, and we are tackling several
other different barrier remediations.
There's about 35 major road crossings –
road and stream crossings where we're
reconfiguring the culvert to approximate
the characteristics of the adjacent
streams. So in general we're widening
out culverts that exist and burying them
deeper so as a fish moves through, it's
again, an approximation of the natural
characteristics of the stream. In
addition to that there're about 100
small scale barriers that Milwaukee
Community Service Corps, who is
volunteering with us today on the
fishway, is also tackling.
These are barriers that can be removed
predominantly by hand labor, stretches
on the base of species, log jams,
railroad ballast deposits, etc. In
total, we're reconnecting about 158
stream miles allowing access to 119,000
acres of habitat including 14,000 acres
of wetland habitat. So to our knowledge
it's one of the most comprehensive large
scale barrier removal and habitat
accessible projects of its kind.
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