Lake to be open by summer

The McKinley Lake dredging project is on track for a March completion, as long as weather behaves.

Charles Ikenberry of Houston Engineering met with Creston City Council Tuesday, Dec. 16 to review project progress since adaptions were approved by the council a month ago.

“To date, they’ve removed a total of almost 259,000 cubic yards from the lake. More than 40,000 additional cubic yards in the last month or so,” Ikenberry said. “Some of you might remember that our original plan only called for 250,000 cubic yards of dredging in the first place. A fair amount of that 259,000 has actually been removed lower than we anticipated, so we haven’t got all the sediment we have planned yet.”

Due to overdredging in some sections of the lake, more money was needed to complete the project, found via funds from Creston Parks and Recreation and the Iowa DNR, a donation from the High Lakes Outdoor Alliance and some fund reallocation. Additionally, Construction company JNC agreed to waive 15,000 cubic yards, amounting to about $100,000, from the total.

Ikenberry said there is now enough money left in the budget to remove about 306,000 cubic yards. With about 46,000 cubic yards of sediment left, not all of it will be moved to the spoils site.

“Not all of that material can fit at the spoil site. We can probably get about 280,000 to 290,000 cubic yards there, but beyond that, it gets too high. [Number one] that’s not what the landowners agreed to, number two, it becomes difficult to work, number three, some of this material that comes out of the lower portions of these zones. It’s very, very soupy, so it just doesn’t haul and stack well,” Ikenberry said. “Some of that material, I think at some point we’re going to have to start filling in some of the holes that we had to dig a bit deeper than anticipated in the lake.”

Luckily for the budget, the cost to move sediment around the lake is cheaper than the cost to haul it to the spoil site. JNC charges about $7.25 per cubic yard to take it to the spoil site. The cost to move the sediment to a different section of the lake has not been decided yet, but Ikenberry said it would likely be between $3.50 and $5.50 per cubic yard.

Despite the overdredging, Ikenberry said the project is still looking at a March completion date.

“This is the lion’s share of the work of this project. It’s probably 80% dredging. There’s a few things to do once the dredging is done, but this is certainly the big obstacle, and I think barring no worse than average weather, we’re in pretty good shape for that date,” Ikenberry said. “We’re hoping for a really frigid January to freeze things up solid so they can work on some frozen soil and get the rest of that material, or very close to what we had planned.”