Sewer project moving part of Cedar Rapids nature trail to higher ground

It's not every day that you get two devoted nature lovers out in the timber to talk about toilets and trails.

But there they were, Daniel Gibbins, the city's parks superintendent, and Rich Patterson, the director of the Indian Creek Nature Center, out on an oft-flooded segment of the Sac and Fox Trail along Indian Creek last week where a major metro-area sewer project will start later this year that in the process will swing a half-mile piece of the trail to higher ground to protect it from frequent flash flooding.

The sewer project is driving the changes, but the trail stands to benefit.

The 1.2-mile segment of sewer work - from Indian Creek's confluence with Squaw Creek north, under Mount Vernon Road, to the west of Rosedale Road - is the first of 20 segments and a total of 16 miles of sanitary sewer line that will replaced and enlarged in the next 15 to 20 years at a cost of $40 to $45 million. The replacement line will follow Dry Creek and then Indian Creek from Robins to Hiawatha, Cedar Rapids, Marion and a piece of Linn County as it makes its way to Cedar Rapids' Water Pollution Control facility along Bertram Road and the Cedar River at Highway 13. Each of the jurisdictions is participating in the cost of the sewer work, which is vitally needed in some stretches as development has nearly outpaced the capacity of the sewer.

A series of focus-group meetings, which involved engineers, trail users, city staff, Patterson and others, have been part of the planning for the first segment of the project. And Patterson credits the engineers with being “sensitive to things other than just getting a sewer in place” and with trying to do two things well at once.

Gibbins says the marching orders in laying the new sewer segment and moving the trail to higher ground have tried as much as possible to avoid wetlands, to minimize creek crossings, to limit tree removal and to avoid high-quality trees while enhancing the ecological habitat and the trail.

The trail move will get most of the half-mile stretch of trail above the 100-year flood plain and should protect against flash floods that scour out this part of the trail every two or three years, put it out of service to users and cost the city $35,000 each time to fix the damage, Gibbins says.

“We don't like our trails to be unusable and neither does the public,” he says.

Patterson is a historian of the Sac and Fox Trail and he says city leaders made a good decision back in the 1960s when they bought up mostly flood-prone land along the Cedar River south of the downtown to create a primitive trail and to provide room for the river to flood. The city's purchase included property for the Indian Creek Nature Center, which sits at the spot where Indian Creek meets the Cedar River.

The 3.5-mile segment of trail along the Cedar River opened in the 1960s, and in 1975, the Sac and Fox Trail became the first trail in Iowa to win the status of National Recreation Trail from the U.S. Department of the Interior. In 1990, the city extended the trail north along a section of Indian Creek, stretching the length of the crushed limestone trail to a total of 7.2 miles.

Patterson says the trail and the metro area's sanitary sewer system have been intertwined for years as the section of trail along the Cedar River was followed by a sanitary sewer line to the city's Water Pollution Control facility, which opened in 1980.

Gibbins says the new segment of sewer line will require a 100-foot-wide right of way and the new trail alignment something less wide. Both will mean cutting down trees.

“Any construction is ugly,” Gibbins says. “People have to realize that in the construction phase you've got to get in there and take some things down. However, we've been looking hard at the re-establishment phase to improve (what is there now).”

Both Gibbins and Patterson look at what they say is bottomland timber along this stretch of Indian Creek and say it is what it is, not something more.

Patterson says as recently as the 1960s most of the land along this part of the trail was used for grazing and crop production and had few if any trees.

“The timber took the land over because the city took it over,” says Patterson. “This is not pristine forest.”

Gibbins says swamp white oaks and other oak varieties likely will be planted along with, perhaps, hickories and hackberries to replace trees taken down for the bigger sewer line and the trail move. Patterson says sycamores and Kentucky coffee trees would work well, too.

“This gives us an opportunity to do some restoration work, to add more diversity of species in here, which will gradually improve the health of the woods,” says Patterson.

Dave Wallace, a project engineer with the city, reports that the sewer work along this stretch of trail will replace an existing 42-inch-diameter sewer with a 60-inch one, with construction set to start in the fall of 2011 and to be completed in 2012. The trail realignment here will come in 2012, and the city is seeking a $110,000 grant to pay about half of the cost.

“But the other piece, you need sewers,” says the Nature Center's Patterson. “Sewage. It's got to go somewhere. And it might as well go someplace safe.”