Big dig for small creek in Santa Rosa

Kevin McCallum, THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

Confined to a narrow flood control channel for more than 50 years, Colgan Creek is once again getting some room to roam.

Workers have been sculpting a curvaceous new course for the creek in an ambitious bid to restore the city’s most polluted waterway to a more natural state.

Along a half-mile stretch of Bellevue Avenue near Elsie Allen High School, bulldozers and excavators have been removing hundreds of truckloads of dirt as they reshape and widen the previously flat, straight channel.

“It’s nice to see a project you’ve been working on so long move forward,” said Greg Dwyer, the city’s civil engineer on the project.

Built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers around the 1950s, the original channel along Bellevue was about 70 feet wide with steep walls, a largely flat bottom and little vegetation to shade the water.

via Big dig for small creek in Santa Rosa | The Press Democrat.

Leave a Reply