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FISHPOT CREEK WATERSHED RESTORATION PROJECT
The Fishpot Creek watershed covers 10.9 square miles and includes parts of seven cities and unincorporated St. Louis County. Rapid urban development has caused flooding, channel instability and degradation of water quality within the watershed's drainage network.
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
Stream channel management has been narrowly focused on maximizing flood conveyance. Borne of a historic need to carry raw sewage away from homes, this approach became established engineering practice in urban areas. It is costly and generally ineffective for several reasons. In general, flooding and channel stability is addressed only after municipalities, making the approach inherently reactive receive complaints. Although drainage networks are geomorphically interdependent, projects are designed reach-by-reach, with no watershed-scale geomorphic analysis. This approach both neglects proactive action (e.g. to protect stable areas from impacts), and fails to properly diagnose and treat the root causes of channel instability, flooding, and environmental degradation of channels and riparian corridors. Even when projects perform adequately within a given reach, they generally address only a single purpose (e.g., bank stabilization) at the expense of other values, such as riparian habitat. Moreover, these "repairs" often move stability and flooding problems elsewhere in the drainage network. In many cases, channel management projects have caused as much environmental and structural damage as the problems they were designed to solve.
PRODUCTS AND OBJECTIVES
These problems arise not from a lack of scientific and technical knowledge, but from poor integration of existing knowledge. Management of watersheds and drainage networks for their full potential requires an interdisciplinary approach that takes into account watershed-scale geomorphic processes to diagnose the real sources of problems and applies the appropriate built solutions in the appropriate locations. We have assembled a team of scientists and engineers with demonstrated capabilities in such state-of-the-art holistic management. Working closely with technical and policymaking stakeholders in Fishpot Creek's watershed, we propose to produce a management design for the watershed based on interdisciplinary diagnoses of management problems and state-of-the-art biotechnical solutions. Although watershed-scale, interdisciplinary approaches and biotechnical engineering have been widely advocated, they are still poorly understood and very rarely implemented. Thus, although widely advocated, this approach is still fundamentally new because it has been so rarely put to use. Using our team's demonstrated capabilities to apply this approach, we propose to:
Perform a geomorphic and engineering analysis necessary to produce a holistic design for realization of the full potential of Fishpot Creek's watershed and drainage network.
Working closely with professional and private stakeholders, demonstrate all aspects of this methodology and thus effect the paradigm shift necessary to properly direct stormwater and water quality protection funding to appropriate, multi-purpose, long-term solutions.
PROJECT SPONSOR
St. Louis County Soil and Water Conservation District
COOPERATING AGENCY
EPA/DNR
CONTACT
St. Louis County SWCD
1215 Fern Ridge Parkway Suite 212
St. Louis, MO 63141-4406
Jackie Moore
telephone: 314-453-9555
email: jackie-moore@mo.nacdnet.org
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