Ware’s Creek Dredging Digs Up More Than Anticipated

Bradenton City Councilor Patrick Roff says that he’s satisfied with dredging under way at Ware’s Creek.

Roff can watch the Ware’s Creek work from his house, which has a view of the creek and the dredging equipment. He sees 20 years of effort to get the creek cleaned out coming to fruition.

“I’m very happy that we’re at this point,” the Ward 3 city commissioner said last week.

But the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers reports that the work is moving at a slower pace than expected.

“The latest information is that they’re dredging slowly,” said Amanda Ellison of the Army Corps. “They have had to make some equipment adjustments because they encountered more silt and sediment than they had anticipated, but work is moving along.”

Transwest Dredge, the contractor, is supposed to remove about 37,000 cubic yards of silt from the creek in the current work phase, according to the contract.

Ellison said Tanswest finished removing the mangrove island last week and has transported much of the dredge material to the landfill. She estimates that about 10 percent of the dredging work has been completed so far.

Roff said two big components of the work were the removal of an island in the center of the creek and the removal and disposition of mangroves.

“The big thing that we got done recently was that the island’s gone, which was a really good deal. That was the part that I wasn’t sure how we were going to do it,” he said.

“They cut all the trees out by hand, ran them through chippers and they came in with equipment and tore the root systems out. I was surprised to see that the root systems of the mangroves are really nothing.”

Upstream from Roff’s house, by 20th Street and Virginia Drive, workers were removing their gear from the waterway last week. They had put out mats for their equipment to get at the mangroves, and with that work done they were using a large forklift to take the mats out of the water and load them onto a truck.

The next step is to get the barge under the bridge at Manatee Avenue and start removing the debris.

“Probably the biggest hydrological changes are going to take place in Phase One,” Roff said.

The big work will be bid in the summer by the Army Corps of Engineers, Roff said. The problem at Ware’s Creek has been the muck that has piled up in the creek, he said.

Flooding from the creek has been a concern for nearly 40 years, he said. Indeed, a Sarasota Herald-Tribune column from July 1984 discussed the problems residents in the historic Ware’s Creek community were experiencing with floods after heavy rains, and possible solutions.

“This muck was not preventing the flooding; it was a part of the flooding,” Roff said. “Upstream, there were several choke points that need to be removed. So that’s what’s going to happen in Phase Two.”