Good News! -Marin County wetlands rise again in Hamilton airfield restoration - San Francisco Chronicle\Saturday, April 26, 201 A cheer went up as salt water from San Pablo Bay poured through a breached levee Friday and flooded old, abandoned Hamilton Field in Novato, a landmark moment in the effort to restore Bay Area marshland habitat. The levee breach was the last, biggest step in nearly two decades of work by conservationists to reconnect 648 acres - about 1 square mile - of wetlands to the bay and to restore tideland habitat for shorebirds, waterfowl, fish and wildlife. The flooding of the runway at the former Air Force base, which was closed starting in 1973, is part of a regional effort to restore 100,000 acres of former wetlands around San Francisco Bay, according to conservationists. The Hamilton area was diked off around the turn of the 19th century, cutting off a primary landing spot for thousands of migrating waterfowl along the Pacific Flyway. It had remained dry until Friday, when a backhoe dug out the remaining mud barrier. Its actually very emotional for me to see this piece of land that has been disconnected from the bay for at least a century connected again, said Sam Schuchat, the executive officer for the California State Coastal Conservancy, which is jointly handling the project with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Now, as the years go by, as the seasons go by, well be able to watch this landscape change. The bay water began seeping through as the last chunk of mud was pushed out of the way during high tide Friday. Within seconds, water was rushing through the breach, flowing like a river through the man-made channel onto a portion of the airfield already covered with water from recent rains and runoff that was deliberately pumped in. The wetlands will fill up and recede with the tides, said Tom Gandesbery, the project manager, but it will take 10 or 20 years for it to become a salt marsh. The trick now, he said, is to wait and watch the marsh vegetation grow. Creating the new tidal marsh, which cost $107 million over 10 years, involved more than just letting in the water, Schuchat said. Draining the land had caused it to subside, he said, so 5.6 million cubic yards of dredged mud had to be brought in to raise the land to its natural height. Volunteers and students planted native vegetation and grew tens of thousands of plants on the imported material, three quarters of which came from dredging at the Port of Oakland. Whole story: sfgate/bayarea/article/Marin-County-wetlands-rise-again-in-Hamilton-5430696.php
Posted on: Sun, 27 Apr 2014 18:47:56 +0000
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