Rainfall has not delayed crews from continuing work on the Krug Park lagoon.

“The rain doesn’t affect the dredging operations as one might think,” said Jeff Atkins, City of St. Joseph Parks Dept. Superintendent. “With the clay bottom that’s in the lagoon that was installed back in the late 70s it’s actually a very stable surface.”

City equipment has not had any issues getting into the lagoon to remove the muck, however getting rid of the muck has been another issue.

“Where we’re running into problems with all the rains is where we were dumping it would get too wet,” Atkins said. “We couldn’t get in to dump, so we could take it out but we couldn’t get rid of it. So that set us back a little bit of time.”

Dump trucks have been used to transport material from the lagoon to the dump area at the top of the park.

The City Weekly reports the dredging process is around 65% complete as of Thursday morning.

“If we could get another good hard week of good weather we would be very close to being done with the dredging operations,” Atkins said.

He hopes to have the dredging process complete by the end of June.

“It’s up then for the contractor to move in that will be doing the shoreline restoration, the waterfall restoration and in fact they will be doing some expansion on the waterfall and they will repair some of the softer areas in the clay liner,” Atkins said. “Basically shore everything back up again so we can start allowing it to fill.”

The renovation of Krug Park lagoon is a Capital Improvements Program (CIP) sales tax project which involves cleaning undesirable material from the lagoon, performing work to enhance the shoreline around the lagoon, and add features to beautify the facility.

Work is still expected to be complete later this fall.