Culvert Removal

The day has finally come where we get to take out the culvert. We waited for a low tide and once most of the tidal waters had drained from the estuary we installed a simple diversion of the freshwater flowing from the estuary and pumped it around the construction area to the beach. Without water flowing through the area, work became a matter of getting the old road fill and culvert out of there and bringing in the new. Only it wasn't that simple, because the road fill was layers of unsuitable fill and layers of nice beach sands and gravels we could use to construct our channel. Unsuitables left the site but the precious beach sands were set aside for later in the evening. In order to reach the center of the excavation excavators worked from both bridge abutments.

We wanted to maintian the meander of the tidal channel upstream of the culvert, so special attention was paid to holding this bank in place. We will plant this bank with saltmarsh vegetation plugs and the biodegradable coir mat will collect drifting seeds and turn into a saltmarsh Chia Pet.

The channel area was over excavated and then filled with a special mix of washed sand and rock for the channel floodplain, while the preserved beach sands were used to construct a channel down the center.

Oh, did you notice it is getting dark, those winter low tides like the darkness. Once the channel was built we stopped the diversion and let Pitship Estuary drain freely for the first time in at least 50 years.