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Forest Service Honors KRC for Streamsweeper
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It started as idle talk by serious fishermen and a sketch on a bar napkin. Somebody should invent something that would clean the crud out of trout streams. “Like a Shop Vac,” explains Rich Bowman, executive director of the Michigan Council for Trout Unlimited.
It ended with a spic-and-span, class 1 trout stream and a whole slew of awards from the U.S. Forest Service, including one to Michigan Tech’s Keweenaw Research Center.
The Rise to the Future Award honors extraordinary cooperative efforts that result in equally extraordinary ecological benefits for national forests. In this case, KRC, the Michigan Council for Trout Unlimited, Wisconsin Trout Unlimited and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources threw their time, money and muscle together in a “collaborative aquatic stewardship” that involved taking out three dams to restore the cold water fishery on two rivers. For their part, KRC and the Michigan Council of Trout Unlimited Part built their Streamsweeper and used it to clean out a stretch of one of northern Wisconsin’s finest trout streams, Elvoy Creek.
The award was presented on behalf of the forest service’s Region 9, which encompasses most of the northeastern U.S., at a Dec. 9 ceremony in Milwaukee.
The Streamsweeper was commissioned by the Michigan Council of Trout Unlimited (TU) about 10 years ago, when the group unexpectedly got some money to make a prototype of their aquatic Shop Vac.
“Some things worked, but a lot of things didn’t,” Bowman remembers. TU didn’t have the millions of dollars it usually takes to perfect a complicated piece of equipment like the Streamsweeper, so Bowman started looking for help. “I traveled to lots of engineering schools in the state, but when I told them we’d spent most of our money, they weren’t interested.”
Then he went to KRC and talked to its director, Jay Meldrum. “Jay said, ‘I think we can figure something out.’”
And he did. With funding from the Ford Motor Company, three senior design teams of MTU students worked two years to work some of the bugs out of the Streamsweeper, at least to the point that it could be put to the test.
Meanwhile, the Chequamenon-Nicolet National Forest, in northern Wisconsin, and the Wisconsin DNR had their hearts set on improving the Elvoy Creek fishery.
“Elvoy Creek is a class 1 trout stream, the best of the best,” says Sue Reinecke, a USFS forest fisheries biologist. “It’s totally sustained by natural reproduction.”
But it needed some help. Decades earlier, loggers had put a dam in the creek. “Rock fill was backing up a lot of water, and there was an impoundment 80 feet wide and 1,000 feet long,” Reineke said. “That meant the loss of the channel and loss of habitat, and it was very shallow with lots of muck.
“It wasn’t good habitat for brook trout.”
The problem with taking out the old rock dam was that all that muck was bound to wash downstream onto the gravel streambeds trout prefer for spawning. Fortunately, there was a deep pool just below the dam, where logs had scoured out a depression in the creek. When the dam was taken down, lots of the sediment settled in this plunge pool. But it was still a mess.
Enter the Streamsweeper. “TU and KRC needed a place to test it, and we provided the place and some funding,” Reineke said.
So last summer, the Streamsweeper went to the Elvoy. It’s a big machine, and you’d think it would tear up the soft riparian landscape. But because it runs on tracks, like a tank, it’s weight is spread out for minimal impact.
Once it crawls to where it should be, the Streamsweeper can lower a hydraulic pump (this is the Shop Vac part) with an extendable arm down into the stream and suck up all the goo.
“The rich sediment is pumped to an upland area where it later revegetates,” Meldrum explains. “Meanwhile, the spawning areas are uncovered, bringing the stream back to life.
“Sand and sediment from logging accidents, construction runoff or, in this case, dam removal, are like a desert for trout,” he says. “No one can survive in a desert. By cleaning the streambed, the trout return to their spawning areas and holes where they can find refuge and food.”
The Streamsweeper isn’t a finished product. Sometimes it didn’t do what it was supposed to. “But overall, it worked really well, Reineke said. “It shows great promise.”
It certainly worked well enough to convince Bowman and Meldrum to pursue its development.
“It’s performance has been inconsistent, and we really need to figure that out,” Bowman said. “That’s what Michigan Tech brings to this collaboration; they have figured out quite a few of the problems already.
“A lot of folks have a strong desire to make this a commercial machine,” he added. “We’ve probably raised and spent $250,000 on this, which seems like a lot, but in the auto industry, they can spend that much redesigning a headlight.”
The Streamsweeper could accelerate the clean-up of America’s once-pristine rivers and creeks, Meldrum said. “It can bring a trout stream back to life the same year, whereas other methods take several times that long.
“This technology has great potential, and the award highlights the hard work of student teams, faculty, and research staff at KRC,” he said.
KRC and the Michigan Council for Trout Unlimited are looking for funding to create a second-generation Streamsweeper incorporating improvements made by the students and KRC engineers.
In the meantime, having won the regional contest, the river restoration project is up for the national Rise to the Future Award. Bowman’s not sure if he wants any part of the national spotlight yet, since the Streamsweeper is not quite ready for prime time.
“I don’t know what we’ll do if we get a national award for this machine,” he laughs.
But if the brookies of Elvoy Creek could talk, they’d probably tell Bowman to just take a bow. |
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