Thursday, February 26, 2009

Lowest wetland portion of Hill Place (former Aspen Ridge) property being dredged and filled for parking lot in former overflow area of Town Branch

Please click on images to ENLARGE photos of dredging and filling of Town Branch of the West Fork of the White River west of South Hill Avenue and north of 11th Street in Fayetteville, Arkansas, on February 26, 2009. Rich, absorbent soil being hauled away to make space for truckloads of non-absorbent, non-organic red dirt to provide parking spaces for Hill Place student apartments.


4 comments:

Anonymous said...

You make some good points here. But didn't the U.S. Corps of mechanics say that only a minimal part of this area was wetland?
You must realize that the guys who write up the reports for the corps are working for the developers. And the council WANTS to believe that every project is good for the city. And Dan Coody pushed all the projects that went bankrupt! He never understood a thing about the environment except the part that was around his house on the hill.

Anonymous said...

So you are saying that Coody could have kept some people out of bankruptcy if he had listened to people who were objecting to the really environmentally damaging projects. Maybe, but some of the council members would have voted for every project regardless of what Coody said.
They wanted to believe no matter what evidence was presented.

Anonymous said...

Correct me if I am wrong, but wasn't there a trailer park on the Hill Place site?

The site plan includes a lot of rainwater runoff mitigation measures. Its actually not a bad project.

aubunique said...

There wasn't anything but wet woods there. It probably was cleared for firewood a couple of times since settlement, but was too wet to plow or even to hay. The picture in the post above shows almost this same view as it was before being cleared and filled for Aspen Ridge.
The large mobile-home park was to the left west of the Town Branch with access from 11th Street. The west shore of the stream was several feet high and overflow didn't affect it. But most of it was moist soil that had never been damaged by the farming activities of the past and had only three narrow blacktop driveways between the rows of mobile homes and only short gravel parking spots by the trailers. The sewer and water lines were so old that some of the access lids were crushed by the surface roots and trunks of huge trees. Water didn't run off that site because it had absorbent soil with the ability to let sheet water stand as shallow pools in the grass and soak in soon enough after a big rain to prevent mosquitoes from hatching. The whole place was a natural rain garden. Go to www.aubunique.com for some of my old pictures from the area west of the Town Branch.