Fox Waterway Agency crews have begun a three-year project to dredge one of the busiest channels on the waterway.
According to agency officials, most of the 27,000 or so registered boaters who use the waterway in a typical season will regularly pass through the eastern navigational channel that connects Pistakee and Nippersink Lakes, in the village of Fox Lake.
The channel is best known for the bridge that carries U.S. Highway 12 over it. Because of its low height, boaters have traditionally–though illegally–placed empty beverage containers on the edge of the bridge as they pass underneath it, giving it the nickname “Beer Can Bridge.”
The channel was last dredged in the 1960s, agency officials said. Parts of the channel are less than 3 feet deep, which can cause even small boats to run aground. The dredging project plans to deepen the channel to about 6 feet.
To keep resources available for other projects, the channel-dredging will be conducted only during winter construction months, from October through December, because the fast-moving channel rarely freezes completely.
It should take three seasons to dredge the channel from the bridge to Grand Avenue, a distance of about 2,100 feet, explained John Palmieri, dredging supervisor.
“Doing this with conventional mechanical dredging, where we scoop up silt and haul it away on trucks, is very time-consuming,” Palmieri said during a recent tour of the project area. “But this project will benefit the great majority of boaters.”
The Fox Waterway Agency is a state environmental agency created in 1984 to maintain the Fox River and Chain o’ Lakes. It spends most of its annual budget of about $1.2 million on dredging the shallow waterway. The agency has no taxing authority and gets its revenue from user fees and grants.
