(Orleans)– The Iowa Department of Natural Resources is seeking bids on a couple of projects in the Iowa Great Lakes. Fisheries Biologist Mike Hawkins says one of those is for the restoration of an island on East Lake Okoboji…
“There’s a very small island that is between Trigg’s Bay Resort and The Ritz, to give you two landmarks there. The island kind of looks like a point of land that sticks out. It’s not real big, but historically it was detached from the shoreline and water was on all sides of the island. In the last few years there’s been quite a bit of erosion on that island with all the high water that we had and the shoreline has failed on the island and a lot of material has been swept off and now the island kind of looks more like a peninsula, so a lot of the material that was on the island is between it and the shoreline.”
Hawkins says the DNR has been working in conjunction with a condominium association in that area to restore the little known geographical feature…
“And that will include building up the shoreline of the island and doing some excavation around the island to but that material back up on top; a bunch of clearing and grubbing because there’s a number of invasive species up there, trees that are on there. A lot of them have fallen or collapsed because of the erosion. We’ll be removing all of that and putting a layer of good soil up on top and re-seeding that to prairie and potentially planting a couple of oak trees there, so all in all it will be about 400 feet of shoreline all the way around the island that will be restored and stabilized and plus all of the habitat that would create, so.”
Hawkins says depending on how bids come in the project could start yet this year, but more than likely it will be sometime this coming spring with completion hopefully by the fall of 2021. He adds it will compliment shoreline restoration projects recently completed at the Hattie Elston Boat Ramp and Claire Wilson Park.
The other project going out for bid consists of a new pond filtration system at the fish hatchery in Orleans. Hatchery Manager Kim Hawkins says it will replace the existing system installed in the 1970’s…
“That system has deteriorated and it was just made out of wood and things like that in the ’70’s, so now we need something to protect our lines in the hatchery from clogging from things like crawdads and other fish and anything that comes from Big Spirit Lake. So our new system is going to be a design by a company that has a mechanical screen. It basically will be a two foot wide by 12 foot long screen that automatically rotates and sprays off debris before the water can reach our intakes.”
Hawkins says they’re hoping the project can be done sometime in 2022.
