Dredging Boscawen Park duck pond

Truro's Boscawen Park duck pond is to be dredged - here's why and how

Transcript

00:00Originally the pond wasn't here, this would have been a creek of the Truro

00:03River, so all of Bosgowan Park itself was all riverbed and that's been built up

00:08as a municipal waste site. The City Council is now looking to dredge the

00:12pond down. The reasonings behind that is the fact is that we've got a huge build-up

00:16of silt. You'll see here we've got a couple of ducks swimming here but the

00:20ducks in the far distance there, they're actually stood on top of the

00:23mud so the the water levels themselves are very very low. They're obviously a

00:28little bit deeper as you go further down. So the duck pond itself has got a

00:32silt trap which you'll see behind me here on the right hand side and

00:36basically that silt trap is there for collecting all the silt that comes down

00:41from the valley. So there's two tributaries that actually fill this duck

00:45pond. One of them originates in our current cemetery fields and the others

00:49come down from Park Farm and basically the silt trap is designed to actually, as

00:55the water comes in, it actually filters down. Now unfortunately the silt trap

00:59hasn't been emptied out now for about 12 or 13 years. The last time it was done

01:04it was excavated by an excavator and it was that deep they had to lower a mini

01:08excavator in a bigger excavator down into the bottom of the silt trap to

01:12empty the bottom. So they literally excavated it out, put it into the bucket

01:17of the the bigger excavator and then took it off in lorries. So we're looking

01:22at various options to to be able to dredge this. We're going out to tender

01:25now and we're having different contractors come in with different ideas.

01:28We've had the looks at stirring it up and pumping it out into slurry

01:33tankers. We were looking at suction excavators. We're actually looking at

01:37main excavators and also there's a company from Holland that dredge estate

01:43ponds and and rivers and they do that by a tugboat which they drive up and down

01:47with a cutter which is actually quite low impact on the wildlife because

01:50obviously the wildlife moves away. If we do it with excavators what we have to

01:55do is excavate it out, leave it on the side of the pond to allow any wildlife

01:59to actually go back into the pond so any any sort of eels or elvers or anything

02:03like that will then be able to transfer itself back in to allow that to dry out

02:07before it's then removed. One of the key priorities is protecting the wildlife

02:11there's an ecology survey that needs to be taken as part of the tendering

02:16process and obviously we want to try not to disrupt the the wildlife too much.

02:21After it's all done obviously you won't see the sludge here that we've got, you

02:25won't see all the sticks and things that are actually sticking up in the air, the

02:29ducks will actually be able to swim all the way along the whole of the pond as

02:32well as the swans but also we want to carry out repairs to all the edges as

02:36you'll see the edges around the sides they've all started to tumble in over

02:40the years that was all constructed in the early 80s so so yeah we want to do

02:44quite a bit of works there. We're also thinking about putting a secondary pipe

02:48in so that on high flood waters we can actually bypass the water down a pipe

02:53and it's directly out into the river rather than into the pond which will

02:57actually reduce down the amount of silt that also would come back into the pond.