Lighter pothole season supports more Big Sioux River work

With less snow removal and fewer potholes to fill this spring, city crews could turn their attention a different direction: To the Big Sioux River.

Sioux Falls Public Works crews were able to haul out 41,000 cubic yards of sediment, sand and silt out of the river in recent weeks, “and that requires a lot of trucking to get it hauled away,” said Josh Peterson, environmental services manager.

“Thankfully the street team was available to do a lot of that for us, and we saved money on having to contract it out”

The city does maintenance on the river and levee system every winter and has had to use outside contractors instead of internal staff in the past, but “this was a nice winter for us where we didn’t have a lot of snow events, so they weren’t doing a lot of snow removal, which is usually what occupies their time, and then also because of the lower moisture the potholes weren’t as significant as they have been in the past,” Peterson said.

As the sandbars build up in the river, they slow down or block water flow, “and especially as you get vegetation growing in there, it creates a slowdown of the flow, so we’re always trying to keep up with that and keep it cleaned out,” he continued. “We pick a section and rotate through the city, (when) the river flow is low and you’re not fighting the current and the ground is also frozen, which helps with the trucking so we’re not running up the levee and having to repair that.”

While the material hauled out of the river doesn’t have a lot of uses, the city will work with contractors who have gravel pits they’re reclaiming because “it’s good material for something like that to fill the hole,” Peterson said, along with providing some to Minnehaha County for a stockpile site west of town.

“They were going to blend it with some of their material to use for their operations. It doesn’t really have a value to the city — we’re just looking for a place to get rid of it. And because we were giving some material to the county, they provided trucks.”

The season became one of the city’s biggest years for hauling material out of the river, he said.

“We just had great weather this year, which helped,” Peterson said. “We were up by the Sanford Sports Complex, that stretch of the river, and it was good access to get in and out, so we were able to be very efficient.”