Clearing debris from Rancocas Creek proves an ambitious effort

Workers in wetsuits last month began clearing the fallen trees and wooded debris that clog parts of the Rancocas Creek for miles. The mess is so great that Richard Young can no longer paddle his canoe easily more than a few hundred feet upstream from his backyard in Lumberton.

"Every tree that falls upstream winds up getting tangled up somewhere along this reach," he said. "It all contributes to the problem."

Vast quantities of submerged debris and other challenges have caused the ambitious effort by the Burlington County Bridge Commission to cost more and take longer than originally planned.

The creek, a tributary of the Delaware River that flows through Burlington County, unleashed severe floods in recent years that forced hundreds of people from their homes and left an estimated $25 million of property damage.

County officials projected two years ago that removing debris over nine miles of the creek in Southampton, Lumberton, and Medford would lead to healthier, freer-flowing waters and would potentially lessen the effect of future storms.

The commission has already spent or allocated more than the $2.5 million planned, records show, even as two of the creek's four targeted reaches are yet to be cleaned.

And the original end date of spring 2009 for the entire project - a target announced at an April 2008 news conference - was pushed to the end of the year on the current reach of the creek alone.

Commission Chairman John Comegno described the efforts as necessary and his agency's actions as fiscally prudent. Despite the unexpected challenges, he said, the commission has moved as quickly as possible and cleanup remains on schedule.

Noting the project's complexity, he said: "We've actually moved with great speed."

The agency collects just under $30 million a year in tolls from motorists who drive across the Delaware on the Burlington-Bristol and Tacony-Palmyra Bridges.

The commission maintains those spans and six smaller bridges in Burlington County. It also acts as the county's economic development authority, appropriating toll revenues and selling bonds to undertake projects on behalf of municipalities in the county.

A series of dams collapsed during a severe rainstorm in July 2004, causing such devastating floods that the county was declared a federal disaster area. Another major flood in April 2007 brought urgency to ongoing talks about cleaning the creek, where debris had piled up for decades and obstructed its flow.

But the problem was too extensive for local towns to address on their own, so the bridge commission partnered with the county and took the lead on the project.

The commission immediately directed the firm Garden State Engineering L.L.C., of Branchburg, to map and survey dozens of debris fields, prepare a work plan, and help secure the necessary state environmental permits.

The Department of Environmental Protection granted a "general permit" for the entire project, rather than individual permits for dozens of debris fields. This eased an otherwise arduous regulatory process at a time when the DEP's then-commissioner, Lisa Jackson, publicly stated her commitment to seeing the stream cleared and described it as a model project.

Based on the consultant's estimates, the commission awarded a contract in June 2008 capped at $454,070 to Nupump Corp., of Malaga. The firm was the low bidder for the job of removing debris from a 1.4-mile reach in Southampton and taking it to a staging area for transportation to the county landfill.

Yet two weeks after Nupump began pulling debris in late summer, GSE discovered that Nupump was already nearing the financial limit of its agreement and would need more money to complete the job, records show.

After doing preparatory work for a year and earning over $500,000 by the time Nupump was awarded the contract, GSE had not accounted for a substantial amount of submerged debris.

"Material that is below the stream is very hard to quantify. . . . As we cleaned it, other material floated up," said Richard Moody, the company's project engineer.

The bridge commission quickly processed paperwork that would double the value of the contract, and instructed Nupump to continue working, records show.

"It's extremely time- and labor-intensive to do this, so it doesn't surprise me that if they found unexpected submerged debris it would increase the cost and the time frame for completion of the project," said Scott Brubaker, assistant commissioner for land use at DEP.

The consulting engineers discovered the following month that the contractor was doing work beyond the financial limits of the newly doubled contract, and work stopped for a week as the commission prepared a second contract increase.

Nupump carted away 300 tons of debris in the end, weeks ahead of schedule and at a final cost of $1,056,870.

Asked about the increases, James Streit of Nupump said his company was paid per unit removed, and there was more debris than indicated by GSE in bid specifications.

"It's pretty new to the contractors out here," he said of the project.

During the cleanup of the first reach, GSE wrote the commission of another problem: "a significant number of trees" standing at the time of the 2007 estimate had since fallen into the stream. That meant even more unforeseen debris needed to be removed.

There was the potential for obstructions to pile up as more time went by, but the commission wanted to save money by trying to secure federal stimulus funds for the rest of the project. Efforts in 2007 to win money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had not succeeded.

So though GSE had just prepared bid documents for the three remaining reaches of the Rancocas, the commission held off on clearing the debris to seek stimulus money and review other funding opportunities.

When those didn't come through by the summertime, the agency decided to begin work on the next reach.

Nearly a year after the first was cleared, workers from Nupump began sifting through the waters to clear debris away. The company won another contract, amended this month to a limit of $895,000, to clear the second reach in Lumberton.

Moody said he expected the contract amount this time to be more accurate, after the unexpected events earlier. Bid documents his firm prepared in late 2008 and early 2009 for the remaining two reaches had to be revised because so much time had elapsed. Engineers discovered about 10 percent more debris piled up this year as a result of storms, Moody said.

So far the commission has paid GSE more than $1.1 million for work related to the creek.

The project has earned public support from officials in the affected towns, who gathered on the creek banks Oct. 5 in Lumberton for a news conference touting the start of work on the second reach.

Lumberton Township Committeeman Pat Delany said in an interview that he was thankful for the commission's help, but that it was important the project be completed "as quickly as possible."

"It becomes a big net, or a backstop that catches everything else that would naturally flow down the creek . . . with each passing year or month or week or storm, those snag fields get bigger," he said.

Comegno said that the commission would have liked to finish up sooner, but noted that the project has unique issues and that there still wasn't a clear understanding of when the creek was last maintained. Officials described their attempts to pursue other funding sources - which could still come through and finance the rest of the cleanup - as fiscally responsible.

The labor is also conditional on matters beyond the commission's control. Contractors can't clear debris in winter or inclement weather. And along the second reach, at least, their work is limited by tidal conditions

The plan is to have volunteers from each affected town regularly maintain the creek after the commission's contractors do the large-scale cleaning.

"In my mind, what could be a better project than something like this?" said Comegno. "This is assisting businesses and toll-payers and taxpayers within Burlington County directly."