funding for this program is brought to you by the arts and cultural heritage fund and the citizens of minnesota [Music] wood we use it all the time homes buildings paper turns out logging and sawmills were big in clock and duluth in the early 1900s and they left behind some big problems [Music] there's an 18 million cleanup project going on right now to remove massive amounts of wood waste stumped in the bay this will create better habitat for local aquatic and terrestrial wildlife but what is natural right so what's the deal this is where we start digging let's take a look at the map here's a cool upset that you can use to zoom in on the river look at all those polygons the green ones are habitat restoration sites it shows some of the work going on here here's one on wood waste at grassy point that's by the bong bridge and it looks like melissa scholand might have some answers she's coordinating the cleanup project at grassy point with the dnr let's ask her what's happening hi melissa what can you tell us thanks emily yeah i'd love to share some more about the project with you guys so grassy point is a former wetland area that used to be the site of historic sawmills and they would um saw those logs right on the river and they would dump all of their unwanted wood pieces and sawdust and everything right into the river we are taking out over 120 000 cubic yards of wood from that site and it's really hard to kind of visualize how much that really is but we did a little calculation and so if you had a football field and you put 120 000 cubic yards of wood on top of it it would go 56 feet high so our project has been focused on improving that habitat mainly by getting the wood waste out of the water and restoring the area a question that i want to ask is wood waste really pollution because it's something a lot of people don't think about yeah so a lot of times when we think of pollution yet people are thinking of chemicals that get into the water or into the sediment um but yeah the wood waste definitely is a pollutant so the wood waste doesn't have any chemicals in it but it's just built up so much in the river that it's created a substrate or like a bottom that is not very hospitable to plants or to like the little tiny bugs that live in sediment that really form the basis of the food chain in the river without bugs it's really not a great place for fish to hang out what i saw when i looked through the water were boards just boards there were no plants there were no fish there were no bugs growing on the on the bottom so you look down there and you think this isn't right this isn't the way a river bottom is supposed to look so what was the clue that really put you on this project and made you feel like you could do something about this the pilot project back in the 90s showed that if we removed wood waste from grassy point we could get fish to return we could get plants to grow in places that aren't growing now and that it could provide some real benefit even beyond the scope of the boundaries of the st louis river estuary it's going to be beneficial this is really the most biologically productive type of habitat in the lake superior watershed this is the place where where small fish are born and grow that go out into lake superior this is the place that that birds that migrate through the the lake superior basin will rest during migration and refuel at grassy point we actually had the opportunity to use the wood that came out of the water to build a new feature that kind of replicates the types of things that used to be there a hundred years ago so we took the wood out of the water and we used it to build up this long island that kind of extends out across grassy point and then after the wood was done we put a layer of soil and sediment on top of the island so that we could plant it to native species we don't want to have to do a lot of maintenance we design these projects so that they function in a dynamic riverine system i hope that as we clean things up people are going to embrace the river and return to the river and then be good stewards of it themselves [Music] our journey through the grassy point project points us to a few important conclusions it turns out wood can be a pollutant depending on how it got there and how much of it we're talking about it takes a lot of money and years to rebuild a productive ecosystem once the environment has been disturbed the payoff projects like this one mean better habitat for native birds fish and people like ourselves to thrive see you on the river [Music] programming is supported by western lake superior's sanitary district innovating solutions and reducing mercury pollution in the st louis river through research and community programs online at wlssd.com