Housatonic dredging finished early

A $10 million project to dredge the Housatonic River and move the material to Hammonasset State Park in Madison was completed two months ahead of schedule.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced Tuesday work that was scheduled to end March 31 was finished by the end of last year.

“The project was finished in December,” said Project Manager Erika Mark. “Our dredge window was October 1 through March 31. They began dredging in mid-October and finished in December so there was plenty of time to spare.”

A total of 273,881 cubic yards of clean, fine grain sand was dredged from the channel.

It was the second dredging project in the lower end of the Housatonic in less than five years. Some 70,000 cubic yards of sand was dredged in 2013 and moved to Hammonasset, but the riverbed filled again.

The corps said more than 1,000 commercial and recreational vessels are based in the Housatonic River and nearby harbors.

During the dredging, 228,064 cubic yards of material was placed on Hammonasset Beach to replace eroded sand. To get there, the sand was loaded on barges and taken 33 miles from the dredge site. Off Hammonasett, the sand was pumped onto the beach.

Visitors to Hammonasset aired their concerns on social media about the look of the project and quality of the new sand.

Branford resident Martin Adamo, who often walks at Hammonasset, said he was very concerned about the situation and contacted state officials, posted photos on Simply Guilford’s Facebook in mid-December and got 38 comments from the public. He said in February that the beach was looking better.

Brian Thompson, director of land and water resources division at the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, said testing was done before the dredging project to make sure the material was free of contaminates and safe for beach use.

Critics said the Housatonic River has a history of contamination. Thompson stressed that the sand was taken from “the very lower end, near the mouth of river. The PCB contamination happened well up river, Massachusetts was the original source of the PCB contamination,” he said in an interview last week.

He added, however, “certainly sediment moves downstream ... there wasn’t a significant concern PCBs would be in lower part of the river from that far upstream source and sampling confirms there were not.”

The west end of Hammonasset Beach State Park has been eroding for many years because of the orientation of the beach relative to the coastal winds that push sand from the western end to the eastern end, which then ends up having a thicker layer of sand.

The sand dredged from the bottom of the Housatonic is fine- to mediumgrain, which is good for a beach, he said.

The grayish color of the new sand is markedly different from the sand that has been at Hammonasset for years, which Thompson said was normal since it came from a river bottom.

“Some portion of that is organic material and it will wash out or bleach out over time,” he added.

Contributed photo Some visitors to Hammonasset were concerned about the new river sand deposited on the state beach’s shores. Many were worried that it was contaminated because of its dark appearance.