Chattahoochee Storm Repair

Trail Repair

Since we were under contract to clear fallen hazardous trees and repair washed out trails, we hit the trail with a “seek and remove team”.

We quickly noticed dozens of cut stubs along the trail at Victory Park, ranging from a few inches to two feet high.  These represented an extreme danger to children running up and down the trail. One trip could poke an eye out or cause very serious injury. 

Our first order of business was to cut these stubs flush with the ground.

By doing this we were removing the previously cut sprouts, which were often hard and pointed.  Although we did not herbicide the stumps, cutting the stubs flush with the ground any future sprout will have natural flex.

Greatly reducing the risk of a stub injuring a person who tripped and fell.  Nowhere were we instructed to do this in the contract by written instruction or otherwise.  It needed to occur, we were their so we fixed the problem.

Here you see the sprouted water oak is standing 2 feet tall.

Same improperly cut stub now cut flush to the ground.

We cut dozens of these flush to the ground.  Not part of the contract, but sorely needed. 

As we continued on our hunt we located exotics in the forest adjacent to the hiking trails and treated numerous clumps.  Again  we did not have to, we simply did it.

Here you see a health Autumn Olive or Russian Olive as it is also called.

We had given the park a price of $33,000.00 to remove approximately 100 dead and dangerous snags from recent southern pine beetle infestations.   The Park declined the offer.

We were asked if we could afford to take down some of them by Georgi Wellington, our Contracting Officer.

Realizing just how serious and dangerous the situation was. We removed approximately 100 dead snags at no charge.

Now these are gone.

We decided to used much of the snags we cut for trail stabilization material.  A two birds with one stone approach.

Another hazard we encountered was exposed rebar.

This steel spike is about 2 inched above the settled wood plank that it is intended to hold.  As we encountered these we marked them on day one with streams of flagging and then returned with a 2 pound mallet to hammer them back flush with the plank or often into the earth when the log it was intended to whole was washed away from the hurricane.

The contract was laid out using a GPS to mark the items of work along each trail.  The reality was much more work was needed than actually marked within the contract specifications.  We did all we could to mitigate these situations as we came across them, regardless of whether or not the item was required by the statement of work.

We believe in meeting the contract specifications and at times the spirit of the work warrants exceeding the technical specifications.  Because we are so efficient and our crews so experienced once we get on a role we can go beyond the technical and reach the spirit of the design or intent.

This is our trade mark.

When it comes to public safety, if we can, we will go the extra mile. 

This was a rather large contract, $725,000, and consisted of four main items, 1) Roadside Clearing, 2) gravel driveway repair and ditching, 3) Hazardous Tree Removal and Trail Reconstruction, 4) Removal of culverts and the installation of both bottomless and standard culverts.  As a result the Park, relied on the contractor to decide much of the details for work.  We selected the spots such as this section of trail to add trail support to.  The data in the contract gave an approximate location and distance data for the trail repair work. 

It is worth noting that by contract we were not required to build this bridge or, the boardwalk you will see, nor restore the river bank. 

Under the Estimated Quantities section of our contract this park called for NO trail repair.  Yet when I walked the contract the need to restore long sections was quite evident.  As time went on it became clear that this section of the Contract was incomplete.
 
This bridge was designed and constructed by Renewable Resources.

We had bid a handsome price on the trail reconstruction work, for in walking over the trails it became clear that the erosion damage was extensive.  In talking to park officials during the course of the week I spent hiking over all the trails I began to question if anyone else was going to bid.  So in my note taking I estimated what it would take to do the job right.

After being awarded the contract with the help of my high school math teachers family who put up $200,000.00 cash so we could get a performance bond, a requirement that the awarding Contracting Officer would not budge on after it became apparent that we were the only bidder.  We set out to give the park our best.

Miguel is setting the first stringer for a boardwalk that we decided to install in White Water crossing a section of low wet hydric soil.

The worker in the blue shirt Gustine is hammering a 3 feet section of rebar into the earth to anchor the boardwalk.  We installed four 3 foot sections per each stringer.  No designs were give so we think that 4 - 3 foot rebar anchors per stringer will kept this boardwalk stable regardless of mother nature brings us.

The  boardwalk we constructed over a patch of hydric soil was done without “approval” we had been placing wheelbarrow loads of M-10 along other wet spots but here that was not going to work.  So we build a walkway over the section of hydric soil.  The log you see the crew flipping is intended to stabilize a washout along the river bank.

Here the crew is repairing a washout along the riverbank itself.  The park recorded rain events measuring as much as 5 inches of rain in an hour during the hurricane.  In fact the watershed for the Chattahoochee River was reported by the NPS to have received as much as 25 inches of above normal.  For it was not only hurricane Ivan that impacted the park the spring of 2003 had been abnormally wet as the southeast had been hit by bands of rain from a variety of storms as that was a rather active storm period.

The heavy storms lead to numerous river bank erosions events.  This photo shows how the root system of this large oak is still holding but fast moving water has eaten away the riverbank on both sides of the tree trunk.  The contract called for rerouting the trail and letting this grand old tree fail in future storms.  We decided to restore the riverbank by taking logs from other downed trees and rebuild the bank preserving both the tree and the trail.

By using natural logs, granite and other organic fill we are creating a zone that will favor new root growth and development.  It is our hope that as time passes and the wood used to restore the bank decays that plant vegetation will return.  A planting of Silky Dogwoods, and a few River Birch trees along the bank along with some Alders and we could nearly be assured that this tree will continue to thrive for years to come.  This is restoration in action. 

This “log cabin” stacking was performed throughout the construction of this bank stabilization process.  In all this one washout took us two full days to construct and dozens of wheelbarrow loads of M-10 ground granite had to be manually moved some 400 yards per load to reach this section as we could not get our little tractor back in trail due to suspension bridges at the start of the trail head that were to  small for a tractor.

As we leave the highlights of White Water we were praised daily by the public.  Everyone loved what we were doing.

The next set of photos is from the road/trail leading down to the river from Akers Mill.
When performing contracts such as this, Jill and I prefer to stay in our motor home.  While this park has no overnight camping we were allowed to setup our Motor home in the gated work center yard located at the end of the road leading into Akers Mill, again one of the many parks that make up this National Recreation area. Akers Mill is also the location of the parks Ranger Dispatch office so we were in a safe location.

Akers Mill has a gated road that drops to the river about a mile from the main park entrance road.  It has a parking lot and the public is welcomed to hike the mile down to the river.  This road is rather steep in places and we repaired the road but we notices some “short-cuts” that visitors had made. 

This was a short-cut trail that links two sections of the same road together cutting out a few hundred feet.  The erosion was sever and if we did not repair it in time it would create a gully.

According to the contact we had zero footage of trail to repair at Akers Mill.  This staircase was constructed in what was a non-official section of trail and the previous photo is the before shot.   Since it is not possible for the park’s Rangers to patrol all the trails and since people are going to take this shortcut we decided to address the erosion issues by building a trail and installing water control structures.

Here you can see the water control structures we built.  This solution mitigated the erosion that otherwise would have gone unchecked.

From Akers Mill we travel due north about 1 mile to Cochran Shoals which is the premier park of this 15 park system.  It is home to a rolling jogging trail that boarders the Chattahoochee River makes a loop on the north end and has a parking lot located at the end of Columns Drive.  This is the largest of all the parks and to the west there is a trail that leads to Sope Creek, another one of the 15 parks system.

The topography of the trail that connects Cochran Shoals to Sope Creek is very steep and had become highly degraded.

As you can see the actual trail has become lost as people have widen the original trail.  Managing people and foot traffic was always part of the job.

This photo and the one on the next page are good representations of the general before and after conditions.  Our goal was to upgrade, not just repair.

Protecting the exposed roots requires establishing miniature terraces.

According to the Estimated Quantities neither Sope Creek or Cochran Shoals listed any footage under the table stating “Repair Trails”  Our bid for this section totaled $118,100.00 and we went to work fixing all that we thought was needed.

At Renewable, we understand who lives in the forest and that we humans
are just visiting stewards.

My wife and I take this point of view to heart.  I say this to you standing inside a forest that my company planted back in 1984.  Regardless of if I am planting trees, building a wetland, or restoring a trail my focus is to deliver top quality, performance in all that we do.

So allow me to walk you through some of the other trail improvements.

If you are a Contracting Officer or a landowner considering our services remember most of what we did, we made the decisions.  Build a foot bridge, install a boardwalk, insert 10 water bars in a 150 foot run or 8, or get by on the cheap and install a couple; not this company!  If the site needed eight it got eight, if we needed ten wheel barrows of Crush -N-Run we used twelve. The management decision quickly became ours to make and was never questioned.  Our COR never walked these remote areas and his inspection came in the form of a part-time volunteer taking pictures and reporting them back to him.   

This section of trail is located just after the crest of a hill and is above the last picture in section one which shows all the exposed roots.

Simply staking in the waterbars and mim terraces might have been what others would have done but not my crews nor my company.

The five gallon buckets is how we delivered tons of gravel or M-10’s back into the forest.

The trail was through a large forested section and the distance between Cochran Shoals and Sope Creek was more than a mile.  Our backhoe and small tractor only went so far and then we have to rely on man power and buckets.

Because we travel Mexico and Ghana and recruit our workers we build teams that get the job done. And while some may think that H2B workers take jobs from Americans our company has be able to employ more Americans when we have crews of H2B’s working in the forest.  Our Temporary Guest worker add jobs to the U.S. economy for Americans and we have the data to prove it.

This before was taken along the river’s edge in the park called Johnson’s Ferry North.  As a small boy I played along this very riverbank.  My mother’s brother’s home is less than a mile from this site and as a kid my cousins and I played along this section of the river.

Here you see the after.  It is the same location, note the bent tree. Yet you may wonder how did I extend the river bank?  I am standing on fill that we removed from the parking lot at Johnson Ferry South which is across the road.

Tree service companies had been sinking in and dumping their chipper truck boxes in a graveled parking lot.  Have backhoe, have dump truck the park gets two issues fixed in one step.  WE clean up the decaying woody debris that was being dumped and we restored the river bank with rich top soil.

Same section now the pictures are shooting to the north.

Same set of maples.

While we could go on with more photos on the trail repair work you get the picture.

Our final before and after is not of the trail but the launch deck for kayaks at Powers Landing.

The before Jill performed her magic.

The work had to be scheduled during low water periods in order to replace the supports and install new decking.

The after.  This photo was taken in the spring of 2009.  Three years since the deck was replaced by us.