Dredging delay again unsettles Cooper River rowing

A bitter wind was snapping flags and rippling the Cooper River on Wednesday as Jamie Stack strode the snow-clad riverbank toward a chain-link fence.

"Out of the west. This is a typical wind," said Stack, head coach of the South Jersey Rowing Club and manager of the Camden County Boathouse.

Straight, narrow, and scenic, the Cooper has for decades been a destination for national and collegiate rowing championships and home to dozens of local teams.

But an environmentally sensitive dredging operation launched in August to deepen its notoriously shallow racecourse is taking longer to complete than anticipated, county officials said this week.

So this popular destination for Eights, Fours, and sculls that courses through Cherry Hill and Pennsauken - which hosted no fall regattas in 2015 because of the dredging - faces another uncertain year.

"It's dredging and it's dangerous," Dave Smith, CEO of the contractor firm, Mount Construction, told about 20 rowing coaches and other boaters Wednesday night.

Four miles of partially submerged dredge pipes traverse the river, Smith told the gathering, but large parts of the course should be safe "provided there's strict supervision" of where boaters are allowed to go.

Smith and county officials told the gathering at the boathouse that "limited access" to a 1,500-yard racecourse might be available starting March 1, but unforeseen delays could push the start date of spring activity to April 1.

A standard course for college and adult competition is 2,000 yards. Several coaches said that they like to start practices on the water as early as late February, and that they must decide soon whether to relocate practices to other rivers.

The sixth, outermost lane of the course has for years been so shallow that oars touch bottom at low water, and a few boats have gone aground. The project calls for a depth of at least five feet in all lanes.

Regardless of the level of dredging completion, state regulations require that dredging end April 1 because the river is a spawning ground for several species of fish after that.

If the project is not done by April, Smith said, his firm could not resume dredging until July 1, but would have to leave the pipes in place.

Otherwise, "you should have gradually increased access starting in April," Smith said, as his crews start removing pipe.

About 60 percent of the removal is complete, he said, and his crews are working around the clock, seven days a week.

At the close of the meeting, the heads of the rowing and sailing clubs agreed to assemble again this week and propose a plan to the county for how they wish to proceed.

"The entire country is watching this project," John Musial, head of the Scholastic Rowing Association of America, told the meeting. "We have crews coming here from all over North America. And they want to know when we will return to normalcy."

Years in the planning, and initially scheduled to begin last spring, the start of dredging was postponed to Aug. 17 because of design changes recommended by the state.

But a promising and economical new technique for dewatering the dredged sediment for disposal proved inadequate, Camden County Freeholder Jeffrey L. Nash explained earlier in the week.

The technique, called Genesis, "left it kind of soupy" instead of damp, Nash said.

As a result, Mount and the county agreed to turn to a conventional method for dewatering the mud, extending the operation by several weeks and doubling its original cost, to about $10 million.

Camden County, the Delaware River Port Authority, and the state Green Acres program are funding the dredging operation, which includes shoreline restoration.

Nash defended the added cost, saying the improvements will restore a natural resource that brings "about $10 million a year in revenue to the local economy."

That figure is based on a 2004 Rowan University study of what teams and spectators who flock to the Cooper for regattas spend on hotels and restaurants.

The Scholastic Rowing Association holds its national championship on the Cooper, as does the U.S. Rowing Association. The Intercollegiate Rowing Association and the Ivy League have also held their championships here.

"I'd like to be out there [for practices] by the end of the month," Stack said Wednesday. His club has about 40 high school student members and 20 middle schoolers.

"But the fact that they're trying to get it done right makes me happy," he said, gesturing toward the dredging operation on the other side of the fence.

In the near distance lay dozens of broad, 200-foot-long fabric bags, called geotubes, where the dredged sediment is temporarily stored. The project calls for removing about 115,000 cubic yards of sediment.

Suctioned by a barge and piped to shore, the slurry of mud and water is then packed into the porous mattresses, where the water leaches out over many weeks

"You can see it there," said Stack, pointing to a narrow stream of water leaching from one of the nearby bags.

The leachate flows into containment chambers and is piped to the county's Municipal Utilities Authority treatment plant on Jackson Street in Camden.

Andrew Kricun, the CCMUA's executive director and chief engineer, said about two million gallons of dredge water flows daily to the plant, which treats 60 million gallons a day. "So it's not an insignificant amount," he said.

Treating the water was essential, said Fred Stine, citizen action coordinator for the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, because 14 local sewage treatment plants and a Sherwin-Williams paint manufacturing plant discharged for decades into the Cooper.

Stine said that when his organization voiced concerns about contaminants, such as PCBs and arsenic, that the sediment might contain, "the county listened and addressed our concerns."

At the Riverkeeper's request, the dredge operation is also deepening the bottom to seven feet in certain "hot spots" where concentrations of contaminants were discovered, Stine said.

doreilly@phillynews.com 856-779-3841