A log jam that was first spotted in 2006 near Waldo Road has grown to more than 900 feet long and five feet tall causing problems with drainage in the county. (Photo submitted)
900 feet of trees, debris impeding natural flow
Mill Creek has a problem, a 900 feet long, five feet tall log jam near Waldo road that is backing up the water into Marysville.
Jeremy Burrey, Drainage Maintenance Supervisor at Union Soil and Water Conservation District wants to do something to help the city’s main watershed.
“Mill Creek is the only outlet for Marysville,” Burrey said. “The city solely depends on the creek to take their excess water down stream. If that is not functioning properly then we have an issue.”
With water not being able to flow unimpeded water sites in places like Mill Valley Park long leaving those services unavailable to the public. This problem does not only affect Marysville.
Local farmers felt the lack of drainage first hand this past spring as heavy rain saturated the area. Burrey said cleaning up those log jams could help them as well.
“That is what most farmers want too,” he said. “They know is going to flood, they just want it to not sit in their fields for five days.”
The ‘”massive” jam at Waldo road has been building upon itself for the past 13 years and is not the only concern for Burrey and his team.
“In cooperation with the sheriff’s department and police department we used their drones and flew Mill Creek within the county’s borders,” he said. “Then through studying the drone footage and aerial photography I got a good count of how many major jams there are in Mill Creek.”
Thirty large log jams in all, causing the creek to swell from its banks and retain water longer than it should, according to Burrey. And Burrey said the problem is only going to get worse.
“We are seeing storms that we haven’t seen before with rain events of five inches in a couple of hours,” Burrey added. “There is no infrastructure out there that can hold that. It is like the perfect storm. We have the log jam, abnormal rain fall and the frequency that we are getting those is becoming normal.”
Now that Burrey has identified all of the problem areas on Mill Creek, the real issue becomes how to clear out the jams, with funding being near the top of his list of concerns.
“The moment I mention ‘log jam,’ the (Environmental Protection Agency) is like ‘We are out,’” Burrey said. “There are grants out there, but none available for log jams.”
So the burden of funding would fall onto those who petition for the clean up, along with the more than 10,000 parcels in the Mill Creek Watershed. But with the project in its early stages, how the county is going to assess those parcels is still up in the air.
Burrey said, “usually how it works is if you are down by the Delaware County line, you are not using the whole improvement, so we are going to section that off and give you a benefit.
“But if are on the other end then you are using nearly all of project and have to pay for all of the usage,” Burrey added.
With a log jam project, assessment doesn’t follow the usual route though, Burrey added.
“A log jam, I’m not sure how we are going to do it, we may break it up into sections,” he said.
And with the size of the Waldo Road log jam, Burrey said calculating a cost to assess the parcels is new territory. So Burrey and his department visited neighboring counties to see how they have handled their watershed issues.
“We went to Auglaize County, who has done one of these projects, they put a price point on log jams,” Burrey said. “If it is one tree laying down it is $1,000, if it was more than two it was $5,000, it was more than five, it was considered a large jam and cost more than $10,000.”
Burrey said a large portion of the cost comes from what to do with the material once it is removed from the stream.
“Where the Waldo Road jam becomes such a challenge is that there is so much material,” he said. “You either have to burn it, grind it up and haul it out or you let it sit. If you let it sit in the flood zone, it is going to pick it up and send it back in.”
Burrey added that maintenance will also be a big part of the assessment once the material is removed. Burrey stated even if Mill Creek does get cleaned up that it will still flood during heavy rain, but the damage done will be much less.
“I’m not saying Mill Creek isn’t going to flood, the water just won’t be there for three days,” Burrey added.
But Mill Creek is only the start of the flooding issues for Union County. Tracy Richardson, along with some of her fellow state representatives, took tours of some local farms Monday affected by Mill Creek and poor tile drainage.
The county also suffers from a tile main issue. Tile that was put in more than century ago is deteriorating and causing fields to stay saturated longer, said local farmer and Paris Township Fiscal Officer Ryan Lee.
That saturation issue was felt this spring by local farmers causing many fields to go unplanted or put in much later than usual. Lee said, that drainage needs to be treated like a utility or any other necessary service.
Burrey said that the county does have a tile issue but that entire tile leads to a creek that is backed up itself.
“All drainage systems have to have an outlet and if you don’t have that then you don’t have drainage and we have to start here with these log jams,” Burrey added.