Project: Multiple
County: Statewide
By Peter Ziegler, Project Director – 262/470-4301
Using the cold to our advantage, and then sprinting because 30 degree temperature swings and the now longer sunny days shortens the construction window, a lot of our project work gets accomplished on frigid winter days like we had in February. That’s been the race this winter, with our significant snow cover creating a nice insulating blanket, and with nearly zero frost in the ground, conditions have been challenging. We had three projects lined up ready to go, and all were expecting to take off to start construction within a week of each other. We were waiting for cold conditions and then helping Mother Nature along a little bit as you will see from the pictures below.
Removing snow and Reed Canary Grass during the deep freeze allowed frost to set in and created the solid ground conditions we needed to get these projects constructed this winter. We were able to create haul roads for running 70,000 pound trucks across the wetland to move fill for some ditch plugs and scrape activities.
With our warmer temps and some sun, water began to accumulate on the work site, but enough frost is present we should be able to wrap this up before the entire area floods over. It looks like this may be the end for winter work and it came really fast this year since we lacked any frost until early February, and now by the last week of this short month what we have is disappearing.
Once we get rid of a portion of this snow cover I will be back at it with surveying new projects for the coming year. As always, keep the inquiries coming in, we never turn away a good restoration project and the only way to get good ones is to have you, our members and interested individuals, send them to us. Give me a call or send in a project application (found here on our website) and I’ll be in touch.