Years-long restoration of Mountain View salt pond nears completion
Crews are making the final touches of a years-long pond restoration project in Mountain View.
"We're nearing the end of several years of construction, today in this exact location, they're grading out some of the many, many cubic yards of clean fill," Dave Halsing, the executive project manager of the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project, told CBS News Bay Area.
Halsing has been overseeing pond restoration at the Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge, which spans 15,000 acres.
More recently, his team have been working on restoring formerly salt ponds into tidal marshes at the A2W pond near Shoreline Park and Stevens Creek Trail. The pond spans about 435 acres.
"Tidal marshes are really good habitats for fish, and birds and mice," Halsing said.
It's a $20 million project, and conceptual planning to restore the salt pond began back in 2012.
"Grading out the dirt into a nice gentle habitat slope, which will sort of help recreate the more natural gradient between deeper waters on the edge of the bay," he said. "We raised the north end of that channel and rebuilt the bay trail on top of it, and built these pipes so it can drain out and flow out into the pond."
Halsing and his team imported 180,000 cubic yards of dirt to cultivate these wetland habitats.
"A cubic yard is about the size of a washing machine. So, you can imagine 180,000 of those piled up," he said.
Formal construction around the A2W pond began this summer. Crews are excavating the Stevens Creek channel to create a flow path between the pond and the bay.
"Every time the tide comes in, it will drop a little sediment in the bottom of the pond," Halsing said. "That sediment will build up and eventually reach the right elevation for marsh to grow."
Nonprofits such as Save the Bay are helping the marsh grow.
"Save the Bay's been working for years to perfect procedures for restoring the shoreline and recreating some of the habitat that used to exist before so much of the shoreline was altered for development," David Lewis, the executive director of Save the Bay, told CBS News Bay Area.
Lewis said he and his team of volunteers plan to head out to this project next year.
"Removing weeds and invasive plants and replacing them with native plants that are very important for the health of the bay, and for the wildlife that live in the bay," he said. "Need a place right next to the tidal marsh that has enough vegetation to protect them. Protect them from predators, like hawks, protect them from people who are using the shoreline trails."
Lewis said he is optimistic about the progress this project has for the overall health of the Bay Area.
"In 2016, more than two-thirds of the population of the Bay Area voted to tax themselves, a very small amount for each parcel. But together that's creating half a billion dollars in funding for projects like these in Mountain View," Lewis said. "We're actually making great progress, we need to do it faster to stay ahead of sea level rise, but it's really encouraging to see how much great work has happened."
"This work actually gives us hope, gives individual hopes in a time of great challenges, political, economic, and it's really important to find things that we have control over that we can improve," he added.
It's a few more final touches to the A2W pond restoration project before crews cross the finish line.
"It will have more wildlife, more plants. And it won't just be an empty body of water," Halsing said.
While it may take several years before we see significant wildlife bloom by the pond, Halsing and his team are optimistic about helping to restore the Bay to what it once was.
Halsing said they expect to be complete with the A2W project within the next few weeks. They had recently finished building five habitat islands out in the middle of the pond.