Dredging

After more than two months of preparations to dredge Columbia's Lake Elkhorn, the project was shut down for the winter before any sediment was drawn from the lake. According to a Columbia Association announcement, the freezing temperatures made it impossible to use equipment designed to extract the water from the silt. Work stopped just before Christmas and is expected to resume around mid-March. Currently, the lake is frozen over. The Columbia Association is also awaiting a waiver approval from the Maryland Department of the Environment that is required before dredging can begin, a spokeswoman said.

Remarks by President Barack Obama this afternoon at Ellicott Dredges in Baltimore, from the White House.   THE PRESIDENT:  Hello, Baltimore!  (Applause.)  Well, it is wonderful to see all of you.  Give Duncan a big round of applause for the great introduction.  (Applause.)  I want to thank all of you for the warm welcome, the great hospitality.  And I tell you what, I'm going to return the favor by hosting your Super Bowl Champion Baltimore Ravens at the White House this summer.  (Applause.)

People who enjoy walking along the paved footpath around Columbia's Lake Elkhorn will find their route blocked as dredging has resumed and the footbridge at the lake's far end is to be removed for about two months. Other portions of the path might also be blocked temporarily as the months of work continue, according to the Columbia Association, which owns the lake. The $5.2 million project began last fall but was delayed by winter, because freezing temperatures interfere with removing water from the dredged sediment.

The bad news is that the smaller of the two lakes that make up Laurel Lakes is almost filled in with trees, bushes, cattails and other shrubbery. Only a small portion of that upper lake, near Oxford Street, has a section of water visible from the decks of the surrounding town houses along its banks. The good news is that some time next year, Prince George's County officials, who have authority over the water in the lakes, plan to dredge the upper lake, something many local residents have been calling for over the past 10 years.

The bad news is that the smaller of the two lakes that make up Laurel Lakes is almost filled in with trees, bushes, cattails and other shrubbery. Only a small portion of that upper lake, near Oxford Street, has a section of water visible from the decks of the surrounding town houses along its banks. The good news is that some time next year, Prince George's County officials, who have authority over the water in the lakes, plan to dredge the upper lake, something many local residents have been calling for over the past 10 years.

Columbia Association President Phillip Nelson wants to put $500,000 a year aside for future dredging of the town's three man-made lakes, even as a $15 million scouring of the lake bottoms continues. "We just don't want to let [the cost] build up until it's $10 [million] to $15 million again," Nelson said about asking the CA board to approve the idea as part of the new capital budget that takes effect May 1. Although Wilde Lake, the smallest of the three, has been dredged several times since it was built, the huge work at 27-acre Lake Kittamaqundi and 37-acre Lake Elkhorn represents the first systematic dredging since they were built in the years just after Columbia's founding in the late 1960s.

Fifteen residents who live beside Columbia's algae-choked Lake Elkhorn are sponsoring a public meeting Tuesday night to inform the public about the 37-acre lake's prospects. The residents of Swan Point, a townhouse community on the lake's northern shore, were upset when a long-planned dredging project suddenly stopped in March, before the job was finished. The Pennsylvania contractor filed a $1 million suit against the Columbia Association, the lake's owner, contending that it failed to pay the full bill for the work.

The Columbia Association is moving toward approving half the additional money needed to dredge Lake Kittamaqundi to the depth originally planned after heavy storms in the past four years dumped unexpectedly high levels of silt into it. Thursday night, a CA committee of two board members — Suzanne Waller of Town Center and Kathleen Dragovich of Dorsey's Search — accepted a staff proposal to recommend that the full board add $1.3 million...

Dredging of Columbia's 37-year-old Lake Elkhorn will resume, but curbing residential runoff that carries sediment and algae-producing nutrients into it is the key to its long-term health, a panel of four experts told a crowd composed mostly of Owen Brown residents Tuesday night. "We're going to need your help in restoring water quality," the Columbia Association's watershed director, John McCoy, told more than 80 people at the Owen Brown Interfaith Center. Lake Elkhorn, he said "was built to trap sediment, and it's done a very good job of that.

The Columbia Association board of directors has agreed to allocate more than $8 million for dredging Lakes Elkhorn and Kittamaqundi. At its prebudget workshop last weekend, board members agreed to assign $5 million to dredge Lake Kittamaqundi and $3.1 million to dredge Lake Elkhorn. The costs would be divided between the next two fiscal years. The new funding will add to the nearly $3 million in already-approved local and state funds for the projects. According to the budget workshop report, the initial $2.8 million planned for the fiscal 2007 fiscal budget to dredge Lake Kittamaqundi was no longer adequate.

Sparrows Point's landowner turned down a Maryland Port Administration offer to use part of the property for containing dredge material, but both sides said Wednesday that it's not the final word. "We're not really taking this at all as a closed-door situation," said port spokesman Richard Scher, who said the rejection came last week. "This is part of negotiating, and we recognize that. " Scher said the port has a meeting next week with Environmental Liability Transfer, which owns the land and some of the buildings on the former steel-mill property.

Shame on you, Baltimore Sun, for the article on "Shadow over Ray Lewis' life" (Jan. 11). At a time when many of us are celebrating a the conclusion of a glorious sports career with Ray's announced retirement, you choose to publish this article detailing events of 13 years ago. This unfortunate episode involving Mr. Lewis' personal life has been examined and re-examined ad-nauseum throughout his career. Why would you choose to bring it up again at this time? Yes, this was a tragic event.

The Army Corps of Engineers expects to lift navigational restrictions on the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal this week after emergency dredging removed shoaling that emerged in November. At 14 miles long and 450 feet wide, the canal is a major artery for the port of Baltimore, carrying more than 40 percent of the port's shipping traffic: roll-on, roll-off cargo, cars, fuel and coal. So when an approach to the canal becomes clogged with muck that threatens to imperil as many as 50 ships that regularly make deliveries to Baltimore — as happened to the access from the Chesapeake Bay — the folks who maintain the canal will make the earth move to restore circulation.

Some Dundalk area residents are concerned about the Maryland Port Administration 's designs on Sparrows Point, fearing the state's long-range plans to convert a corner of the old steel-making complex into a supercargo shipping terminal could literally dredge up the point's toxic legacy in the Patapsco River. An "emergency" community meeting has been called for 7 p.m. Thursday (Dec. 6) at the North Point - Edgemere volunteer fire hall, 7500 North Point Road in Edgemere. Russell S. Donnelly, a local environmental activist, said residents still sore from a seven-year fight against putting a liquefied natural gas terminal at Sparrows Point need to take a closer look at what the port is proposing to do there.

The Maryland Port Administration is completing its initial review of a multimillion-dollar proposal that would turn Baltimore harbor shipping channel muck into bucks. The plan might eventually replace time-tested dredge disposal methods of piling sediment along the waterline or using it to plug holes in eroding bay islands with a factory that bakes the goo into concrete aggregate for construction. Baltimore would be the first port to use the process. "We're getting ready to take the next step and it's an important step for Maryland," said port commissioner Ted Venetoulis.

— A mesh net tips onto the stern of the work boat "Mydra Ann," and out tumbles a community of crabs: fist-size blues with claws raised in attack mode, tan adolescents trying to scuttle for cover and translucent babies no bigger than a thumbnail. Picking through the pile, state biologists conduct their census, measuring and weighing each Chesapeake Bay resident before returning it to the ice-cold water and several more weeks of hibernation. "There's a lot of little crabs out there.

After years of delays, plans for the dredging of Columbia's lakes Kittamaqundi and Elkhorn are moving forward, as Columbia Association official are weighing technical proposals and hoping to award a contract by as soon as May. For years, both manmade lakes have been overcome with algae and sediment, a soupy mixture threatening to turn them into marshland if left untouched. Over the years, however, the Columbia Association's board of directors has put off dredging in favor of other capital projects.

Columbia Association board members heard requests from residents and village board members, ranging from security improvements to upgrades to aging infrastructure, at a public hearing on how to spend the homeowner group's nearly $60 million annual budget for the next two years. Many of the representatives of the 10 villages that make up Columbia expressed interest in additional security at village offices, while others want funding for upgrades to facilities. Many asked for lake dredging to remain a top priority.

She lived on the Eastern Shore for 30 years and generally loved the place, but one thing Janie Meneely, an Annapolis-born folk musician, never quite got used to was that it rarely snowed on Christmas. She responded as any holiday-loving singer-songwriter might, by penning a poem (which she later turned into a song). In "Santa and the Skipjack," St. Nick gets his sleigh stuck in the mud, then borrows one of the traditional dredging boats to finish his rounds. "Everybody's entitled to some [seasonal]