A Successful Weekend Full of Sand
This weekend we spent some more time working with volunteers to continue making a temporary sandbag dam. We once again had heavy rains all day on Friday. The rains were so heavy that all three of our fishing ponds filled up with water and the spillway waterfall was flowing as if our dam wasn’t broken. Downside – The rains did wash away about 70-100 previously placed sandbags. Upside – Most of them were located in the area around the dam and were easily re-installed. (Well…maybe no so easily if you ask the volunteers in charge of lugging them back into place!)
More faithful and wonderful dam volunteers helped on Saturday to fill sand bags, replace the ones that moved in the rains, and added 300 more sandbags to the ever growing pile. In all, 13 volunteers came out to help and donated a total of 37 volunteer hours! We had volunteers from the Garnet Valley Environmental Club, Boy Scout Troop 10, the Delaware County Historic Preservation Department, and the Department of Environmental Protection. To date we’ve used 20 tons of sand. (If anyone else is looking for sand in the area, they might be dismayed to find that we are buying it all!)
By the end of the day, water was flowing into the millrace enough to begin filling our fishing ponds. I know that I did a little dance of joy!
Today, another 12 tons of sand was delivered, and volunteers filled up 200 more bags. Our goal is to fill all of the remaining sandbags this week and then place them all at the same time into the creek. Volunteers are welcome to join us any time this week, but we will be working tomorrow afternoon from 1-3pm.
Our short term goal – have fishing back up this weekend in time for Memorial Day!
In other news, your generosity continues to humble us. We’ve reached 80% of our fundraising goal on our Dam Disaster campaign. For that, we thank you. On our end, we’re working hard to continue to get the word out about our project. (For all of you in the Philadelphia area, The Preston and Steve Show on WMMR briefly mentioned our project and the Rock the Mill Music Festival (proceeds from Rock the Mill directly support this project). It was very exciting to hear!
Stay tuned for more updates!
