Hog Island under restoration

About six years ago, County Board Supervisor Kay McKenzie had an idea — she thought some plants would go a long way to improve the quality of the environment on Hog’s Island.

The island, which had undergone remediation to remove pollutants from the environment, hadn’t been fully restored — the natural next step.

That’s no longer the case and a celebration Monday recognized the first-of-its-kind Great Lakes restoration project in Superior. The restoration project is changing the landscape of an area with a toxic history.

“I think it’s one of these wonderful attempts where different agencies, from different walks of life, can come together with one common goal to see an issue through to fruition,” said U.S. Rep. Sean Duffy, D-Ashland. He said while there is a lot of partisanship and bickering around the country, restoring the Great Lakes is one of those issues that has bipartisan support.

“We want to preserve this, not just for this generation, but for future generations,” Duffy said.

In 1987, the St. Louis River, including Hog Island, was designated an area of concern because of the loss of fish and wildlife habitat, degradation of fish and wildlife populations, beach closings and other issues. Despite these conditions, Hog Island, its inlet, Newton Creek and the Allouez and Pokegama bays remained important for migratory fish and wildlife populations.

State Rep. Nick Milroy, D-South Range, said as a student of aquatic biology at the University of Wisconsin-Superior, Newton Creek, which flows into the Hog Island inlet was the waterway with the lowest number of living organisms of waterways students studied in the area.

These days, however, Milroy said one of his best Muskie fishing spots is near Hog Island.

After a 10-year, multiphase cleanup process that started in the mid-1990s, remediation of contaminated materials at Hog Island and Newton Creek was completed in 2005. During the final phase of the project, overseen by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, 60,000 tons of contaminated sediments were removed from the lower portions of Newton Creek and the Hog Island inlet.

It was the first cleanup in the St. Louis River area of concern conducted under the Great Lakes Legacy Act.

Then in 2008, the Great Lakes Commission received funding through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to restore habitat. The $630,000, three-year project is underway to restore ecological processes and biodiversity.

“We as a society made some mistakes in past decades and past centuries that impaired our ability to use and benefit from these lakes,” said Matt Doss, policy director for the Great Lakes Commission. He said Hog Island is an example of what the commission would like to see happen across the Great Lakes.

“I think we’ve done a lot better job in recent years of understanding that we’re not just cleaning up the environment, but we’re trying to restore and enhance a critical economic asset for our communities,” Doss said.

McKenzie said she decided to take on Hog Island, but she’s quick to give credit to the project’s “workhorse,” Douglas County Land Conservation Officer Christine Ostern.

“She’s not afraid to dig in,” McKenzie said.

Ostern joined the county seven years ago, just as the remediation was coming to an end. As remediation was being completed, the work began to restore the site. She said the county applied for a grant in 2007, it wasn’t until 2009 when the county was successful in getting the funding for the project. Ostern has done a lot of the on-the-ground work for the restoration project.

“It started with Kay saying ‘can’t we just plant some native plants or something,’” Ostern said.

“This is something we want to take to other communities, this transition from remediation to restoration,” said Mary Baker, Great Lakes regional manager for NOAA’s Office of Response and Restoration.

Tags: news, environment, outdoors, travel