Marsh would mellow east harbour

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Feb 15, 2004
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The Beach Strip
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Posted with permission from the Hamilton Spectator.
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BY ERIC McGUINNESS
The Hamilton Spectator
Thursday, April 20, 2006
Jim Harnum calls Windermere Basin a “big, empty, barren hole” at the east end of Hamilton Harbour, filled with 250,000 cubic metres of black silt that would cost $25 million to dredge.
As the city’s senior director of water and wastewater, he’d like to turn it into a marsh filled with birds, fish and small animals, while allowing new silt to spill into open water near Pier 25. There, smaller amounts could be removed every three or four years at a cost of $3 million to $4 million.
That proposal was presented at two public meetings yesterday, along with a plan to create an oak savannah with 7,000 small trees and shrubs planted between the basin and the Queen Elizabeth Way.
Werner Plessl of the Hamilton Waterfront Trust said the green space would be surrounded by a path that might eventually connect to trails along Lake Ontario and in Red Hill Valley.
Avid birdwatcher Ken Pearce of Stoney Creek welcomed the ideas, saying the land slated for park development “looks like Dieppe now. I’m glad to see something happening there besides industry.”
Pearce said many migratory ducks stop at the basin each spring and fall, but the only way to see them is to park along busy Eastport Drive. He said he’d tried to walk through the Lafarge Slag property along
Burlington Street East, “but they invited me to go away.”
Sheila Crowe, who lives on the bay side of the Beach Strip, said she thought the park area and trail would become popular enough to provide washrooms.
The waterfront trust plans to start developing the 14 hectares of city-owned shoreline land this year. Harnum said plans for the 17-hectare basin need council approval and an environmental assessment, so construction won’t likely begin until 2008.
Windermere Basin, at the mouth of Red Hill Creek, catches dirt washed into the creek, soil eroded from its banks and fine solids in effluent flowing from the huge Woodward Avenue sewage treatment plant.
It was last dredged in 1990. Harnum said an estimated 35,000 cubic metres of sediment has already collected in Windermere Arm, where the basin empties in the harbour. The city will have to dredge that
out in a separate project because it is responsible for ensuring that material from the basin does not affect shipping.
Bill Allison of Dillon Consulting, hired by the city to study feasibility of the scheme, said sediment flow should be reduced by planned upgrading of the sewage plant and by improvements in the creek channel being done as part of the Red Hill Valley Parkway construction.
Dillon’s Gintas Kamaitis said a greenhouse experiment showed aquatic plants grow in the basin silt as well as or better than in topsoil, and tests showed contaminant levels in the sediment are too low to
harm plants or wildlife.
Harnum stressed “this is just a very preliminary concept, it’s very fresh, people haven’t seen it yet,” and said he would only take it to council “once we get some buy-in from the public.”
emcguinness@thespec.com
905-526-4650
 
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