The Noyo Harbor District has searched everywhere in a 200-mile radius for a place to dump the mountain of dredge spoil sand that now stands at the mouth of Noyo River.
Now it has found a home for some just a few hundred yards away.
Noyo Harbor District and the City of Fort Bragg have reached a preliminary agreement to use 24,000 cubic feet of the sandy material to build and bolster city trails on the old Georgia Pacific mill site. The materials would be used over the next two years, if all goes according to plan.
Harbor commissioners heaped praise on City Community Development Director Marie Jones for taking on a regulatory process that had defeated them for many years.
“Marie Jones has done a great job of responding to the water board. She really went above and beyond the call to get this pushed through,” said Harbor Commission member Tommy Ancona.
Jones told the commission she had been working six months to gain clearance for beneficial reuse of the harbor sands.
“The project is good for our community because it will allow us to recycle local materials for a project that benefits us all; namely a 4.5 mile recreational trail along the City”s waterfront and the restoration of 25 acres of asphalt covered coastal property,” Jones wrote to the Harbor Commission.
The Harbor Commission agreed to pay $1 per cubic yard tipping fee to the City to defray the estimated cost of $16,000 worth of testing required by the Regional Water Quality Control Board.
“Diane Henrioulle, of the water board, has provided conditional approval for the reuse of the dredge sands on the Coastal Trail property so long as we complete a leachability study to insure that the heavy metals that might be leached out of the sands remain below quality objectives for groundwater and ocean discharge, whichever is less,” wrote Jones.
Commissioners voted 4-0 to accept the City plan, contingent upon getting Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) money to pay to move the material. It also depends upon both parties signing off on the final draft of the memo of agreement, as well as the testing.
City Council has already approved the concept, said City Manager Linda Ruffing.
“The Council approved the placement of dredge sands on the mill site as part of the Coastal Trail project approvals. I don”t think the MOA will need to go to the Council, but I reserve the right to change my mind once I see the final draft,” said Ruffing.
Ruffing said the City is working with G-P to obtain a temporary access easement through the site so that the material could be trucked up the access road behind the dredge spoils site, across Noyo Point Road, and on the mill site, without ever entering Main Street.
“The trucks will go from the dredge stockpile site up behind the North Cliff hotel and directly onto the City”s property, Jones explained.
“We don”t anticipate any of the truck traffic traversing city streets or Highway 1. The Harbor District will pay to move the dredge sands to the City”s coastal trail property. But overall the project will save the harbor district considerable funds as they will not have to haul these materials over Highway 20 and down [Highway] 101 all the way to a landfill,” Jones said.
What is the dredged material needed for?
“The material is needed to recontour the site and cap archaeological deposits in accordance with the Cultural Resources Treatment Plan. The trail will be slightly elevated in some locations,” said Ruffing.
It will be supplemented with organic mater to make a restoration substrate (soil) to restore 20 acres of asphalt covered areas on the City”s Coastal Trail property, added Jones.
Although only about 5 percent of the entire pile, 24,000 cubic yards is a lot of dirt.
“The total number of truck loads at 20 cubic yards per load is estimated to be about 900 to 1,250 truck loads of dredge sands. A lot of material!” said Jones.
Jones told the Harbor District the City was unwilling to pay for the material and would have to have its testing costs covered.
“Over the past year we have acquired 6,000 cubic yards of materials of much better quality for site restoration for free,” Jones told the commission.
The mountain of dredge tailings, estimated to total at least 400,000 cubic yards, is located off the northwest end Noyo Bridge and to the north of the Noyo Harbor entrance. Covered with invasive pampas grass, the materials compose what looks like a towering horseshoe shaped levee above the Noyo Beach parking lot. In the middle of the horseshoe, a sand pond controls runoff and allows easy removal of the materials, which look like clean sand. There is no room for any more and the harbor and mooring basin will soon need to be dredged again. Dredge spoils are heavily regulated by the state because in most areas, residential and industrial use of rivers means toxic heavy metals are often left in the mud. Because there are no factories and few residences, the Noyo sands are not believed to be anywhere near as polluted as rivers in other areas of the state, but are subject to the same regulations.
The biggest problem with the Noyo is erosion, caused mostly by legacy logging practices. The sediment load in the Noyo has increased dramatically over the decades, even after the logging became more careful.
The Regional Water Quality Control Board is tough on the Noyo because it is listed as a compromised river, thanks not to the agricultural and industrial pollution that plagues other rivers, but the erosion fouled water quality, which is a situation that is not improving.
The City of Fort Bragg had to build a new water plant in 1987 to deal with Noyo River”s worsening sediment load. The water intake system was designed to frequently backflush compressed air through the intake screens to remove silt that was plugging the screens.
Noyo Harbor dredging volumes have increased dramatically over the years, as the practices of historic logging have literally sunk in, a RWQCB study states.
“The average dredging volume in 1994 was 236 percent of the average volume in 1957 and 127 percent of the average volume for the first 10 years of dredging [starting in 1933], the RWQCB document states.
Dredge tailings from the Noyo were used widely on the Mendocino Coast from the 1920s forward, transforming and literally uplifting bridges, roads and towns, historical records show. In the late 20th century, the tailings went to the former Caspar dump and were given away to people who needed fill.
The dump is now only a transfer station and regulations prohibit giving away the materials without testing of both the spoils and the land they are proposed for use on.
