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.
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Dredging Today Staff, November 23, 2011;