COLLEGE CORNER, Ohio — It’s not a good feeling, watching topsoil wash off of a farm field during a rainfall. That topsoil may end up in a public lake, where it becomes bad news for boaters.

That’s what happened at Hueston Woods State Park last fall, the year of the drought. Between the low lake level and the buildup of sediment, boaters had trouble maneuvering in and out of the ramp area at the end of last season, said Mark Lockhart, park manager.

How to remove the sediment? Dredging. A dredge had been scheduled to arrive previously, so the timing was great, Lockhart said.

A 460 Ellicott dredge – which carries a $587,000 price tag – will be at the park for 3-4 years, vacuuming sediment, mostly topsoil, from the surrounding farm community, or material that eroded from creek banks from the area around the boat launch and marina. To understand how a dredge works, imagine it as a vacuum cleaner with an egg-beater on the front, said William Bopp, a planner with the Operations Service Group of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (DNR).

“The eggbeater goes down in the water, stirs it up, sucks it into the pump, that vacuum cleaner, and it pushes it through a pipe,” he explained. “It is piped to a relocation area – we call it a dredge material relocation area (DMRA).

“The pipe is about the size of a telephone pole, 12 inches. It is plastic so it’s flexible. The material we push through is about 80 percent water, 20 percent sediment. The pump sucks it into the dredge and pushes it out.”

The Hueston Woods crew will probably remove 80,000-90,000 cubic yards of material. It will travel about 4,000 feet through that telephone pole-sized pipe to the relocation area. “We typically have 3,500 to 4,000 feet of line,” said Larry Richards, dredge superintendent with Ohio State Parks.

At Hueston Woods, the relocation area is an upland pond, Bopp said. The slurry material gushes out of the pipe, drops in, the material settles and clear water runs out. That water drains into another holding cell, flows through a wetlands and back into the lake.

Dredging at the parks is an ongoing affair, Bopp said. The Ohio State Parks manage seven of the state’s 10 largest lakes. The state parks system has seven dredges and 23 field personnel. Besides Hueston Woods, the dredge crew is currently dredging at Grand Lake Saint Marys, Rocky Fork, Shawnee, Portage Lakes, East Harbor, Buckeye Lake and Muskingum River Crane.

“Our main purpose, because of the way we are funded, is to foster boating safety,” Bopp explained. “But there are additional benefits – removing the phosphorous so that phosphorous is no longer feeding the algae and the algae blooms, creating habitat and creating deeper water for fish.”

The need for dredging is lessened when farmers, landowners and builders use best management practices such as, for farmers, having highly erodible land in the Conservation Reserve Program, using no-till practices and keeping planting or building setback from the edge of a stream, he said.

Funding for dredging comes from the DNR Division Of Watercraft’s Waterways Safety Fund, said Steve Finley, natural resources administrator with Ohio State Parks. It does not come from the general revenue fund.

“So, people who own boats are paying us to do this,” Finley said.