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Coastal Restoration Project Making Huge Progress

By KBJR News 1
June 28, 2011 Updated Jun 28, 2011 at 11:02 AM CDT

Superior, WI - (The Northland's News Center) - A massive coastal restoration project is underway in the Northland.

At one point a bay in the St. Louis River was so polluted that nothing lived there.

"This area was remediated, or cleaned up, a few years ago. It was a 10-year process to do that clean up," head of the project, Christine Ostern says.

In 2005 Newton Creek and Hog Island inlet were remediated under the federal Great Lakes Legacy Act in order to combat dredge spoils and petroleum bi-products.

Now the two areas will be the focal point to demonstrate the potential to restore fish and wildlife habitat at previously remediated sites.

"Now that it's clean it's important to do the restoration so that we can restore what was there originally, provide cleaner, better habitat for fish, for animals, for wildlife in general," Ostern says.

Now with a cleaner body of water a new restoration project will try to re-introduce a diverse group of ecological species.

Wisconsin 7Th district Congressman, Sean Duffy, says this it is important to make sure restoration takes place on the great lakes for future generations.

"You look at the contamination and if we can basically fix our great lakes and pass of a cleaner, better environment to the next generation, that's imperative," Duffy said.

At a time when finding is tight all across the board, Representative Duffy says they are still able to into programs that are fixing the great lakes.

"No doubt funding is tight. There's a lot of money that's being cut, but what we've been able to do is make sure we're still setting a-side money to fund projects like this," Duffy says.

Ostern says even though they are celebrating the progress completed...s he says there is still plenty of work to be done.

"We plan to continue to seek funding to do more restoration in the area because even though we're celebrating a success today, it's not a celebration of the end of the restoration, there is still quite a lot of restoring to be done."

In celebration of the restoration progress to the great lakes, groups involved in with the project gathered at Loon's Foot Landing in Superior, to celebrate the vast improvements made for future generations

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