So who get's a $60k/year salary to turn on the spellchecker at City Hall?

RE: "inferred by the Contract Documents"

I know I'm being a picky editor, but I was unware that a document had the intuitive ability to infer anything, much less requrements [sic]."

Granted, the wording of a document can imply requirements...but infer?

On second thought, maybe the contract documents are being transported via Streetcar, thereby giving them supernatural powers!

___ora et labora___

-ob

I heard from a PDX water bureau employee, the amount of duck doo at the bottom of the Mt Tabor reservoir is beyond disgusting..probably the same for the Laurelhurst pond too...

PS - the last time I used the phrase "I heard...", some poster had to post since I heard it, it must be true... I'd say in all probability, it is....

Making the pond nice involves messing with mother nature. You have to get the ducks and other critters, the plants, sun and water to all balance out. I suspect some biologist could come up with a much cheaper fix that might even work better than this huge project. Will this proposal fix the problem? Make it somewhat better?

The "contaminated material" is algae, I think. Toxic algae can release neurotoxins, dangerous (sometimes deadly) to human and beast. And, the Laurelhurst pond drains to the sewer system.

The material they're talking about is duck poop. The pond is virtually standing water, so it doesn't go anywhere, and then fish that try to get through it run into problems . Basically what they want to do is reroute Crystal Springs around it, thus bypassing the duck hangout, all the while maintaining a nice place for the neighbors to come down and feed the birds with their kids.

The contaminated material is the accumulation of years of run-off, animal droppings, and fertilizers.

When Firwood Lake was first put in, it had a depth of 14 feet. Today it is only 18 inches.

Because it is so shallow, the water cannot circulate, which exacerbates the problem. A fountain-type aerator cannot be installed because it would act as an atomizer dispersing the contaminants into the air.

The City has pursued "cheaper" and "greener" alternatives for years. Only they really were more expensive and they would have involved another 10 or so years of treatment.

After much effort, the City has, for the most part, adopted the neighborhood's remediation suggestions. For this, and their efforts to have the lake cleaned up by summer, Commissioner Fish and Zari Santner deserve some credit.

It's a man made duck pond. So what if it's 18" deep and nasty? It's not worth a million bucks to dredge it.

The contaminated material is the accumulation of years of run-off, animal droppings, and fertilizers.

Right. The accumulated sediment and nutrients (e.g., duck poop) lead to the algae, which is the key toxic part:

http://www.portlandonline.com/parks/index.cfm?c=50343

The fertilizer problem could be largely avoided by using better, less harmful fertilizers (and better stormwater mitigation).

When I was a student at Laurelhurst Elementary, lo these many years ago (20!), they trotted us over to the Park one afternoon to watch the unveiling of a fancy filter machine that was designed to remove 60-odd years of muck from the pond. Much of the detritus (I kid you not) was left-over bread crumbs from folks who liked to feed the ducks. I guess it's time for round two.

I'l wager there's not any meaningful amount of fertilizer, IF ANY, in the pond.
That cannard is simply too convenient.

And no doubt the ultra naive Fireman Randy has bought it.

This plan is probably the result of a wish list idea that wouldn't it be nice if the pond were lot deeper and lake like?

So they wrap it up in a typical load of BS to make it look like responsible maintenence and poof another $1 million dollars they don't have is spent.

I could have sworn we were in a fiscal crisis.

While on the high side, I'm not totally surprised at the price. It was going to be expensive to undo years of accumulated duck doo and the related neglect and half-measures in response.

And Laurelhurst Park really is a jewel worth spending money on. Of course, I doubt they would spend the same amount of money to fix up a similar problem in a park in outer Southeast . . .

It's amazing how 20 years can pass and we forget what really happened. The City had $100k park bond dollars allocated to finally clean up this man-made pond. Fish has been dumped there over the years, and yes bread and animal waste. There was over six feet of smelly compost in the bottom of this shallow pond.

The engineers that were hired had done this many times before - they needed to physically drain to the pond and use large equipment to pull out the gunk. At the same time Parks put up signs and feeding stations for the dunks because bread to ducks is like feeding your kid a diet of only Twinkies, not to mention they had forgotten how to forage for food.

To drain the pond, we had to kill the bottom-feeding fish with a harmless chemical that plugged their gills and they floated to the top. There were three food agencies that wanted the fish to feed hungry people.

What did happen is that then parks director came to the press conference, said he had prayed about it and God told him not to kill the fish (even tho they would be eaten.) Look it up - 1990

The engineers said the aeration devices would not be able to fix the problem. And it didn't. The pond smelled as bad as it always has.

Your tax dollars at work, and here we go again.

I've lived near Laurelhurst Park for many years, and I've seen literal carloads and shopping carts full of bakery thrift store/expired, nutrition-free balloon bread products dumped into the pond. The pond is a dumpster of excreted Wonderbread. I have thought that a possible solution might be a group of roving volunteers who could gently educate and discourage inappropriate feeding, but the people who still dump balloon bread into the pond (in spite of signage stating that it's bad for the waterfowl) seem resistant to reason. It is cheap or free entertainment for a few individuals, but we all end up paying.

The material they're talking about is duck poop. The pond is virtually standing water, so it doesn't go anywhere, and then fish that try to get through it run into problems . Basically what they want to do is reroute Crystal Springs around it, thus bypassing the duck hangout, all the while maintaining a nice place for the neighbors to come down and feed the birds with their kids.

Oh, good lord. My post above made absolutely no sense because I was talking about Crystal Springs, while Jack is talking about Laurelhurst. Duh. Apologies to anyone totally confused. Jack, feel free to delete both of my posts--sorry for the off-topic posts. But for what it's worth, duck poop is an even bigger problem down near Crystal Springs.

so- will they do this "remodel" while the ducks are nesting or will they wait til this Fall?

I think the ducks will all post angry racist diatribes on their facebook pages...

How do they know that 11,574 cubic yards (CY) is clean sediments and approximately 2,480 CY is contaminated material?

"How do they know that 11,574 cubic yards (CY) is clean sediments and approximately 2,480 CY is contaminated material?"

As with so many other city claims they don't have to actually know it. They only need to say it.

Who's going to validate anything? City Council?

Now that's funny.

How do they know that 11,574 cubic yards (CY) is clean sediments and approximately 2,480 CY is contaminated material?

It's not too difficult. They can measure depth easily, and the pond's dimensions are already known. The rest is a 30-second math problem. It's routine.

kathy w., the work can begin when the ducks migrate to Crystal Springs. This migration will be closely monitored by Zari.

Oh, this'll be easy to clean up. Just put up a fence to keep hipsters from skinnydipping in it.

30 min math problem to figure the amount of dirt to remove.
I'm not stupid.
Did they do some core samples to determine at what level the contamination starts and stops?

And like Jack said "What's with the "contaminated material"?

So if you have a core, what constituted the contaminants and then at what level is clean dirt?

I go with Ben's answer on this.