Muddy Water Halts Road Excavation

Yellowish-brown water poured into Prichard Creek this week, caused by the digging of a pond during the reconstruction of Thompson Pass Road.

Alarmed by the sight of so much mud going into the mountain stream, an Idaho state environmental official contacted Federal Highway Administration supervisors.

They stopped the excavation.

“It wasn’t a good idea, in hindsight, to be working in that pond when the water was so high,” project engineer Bob Miller said Wednesday.

The heavy equipment operator, he said, “should’ve stopped when the mud got in the creek. But we were so close to being finished.”

Prichard Creek flows into the North Fork of the Coeur d’Alene River. This time of year, the greatest harm from the sediment would be to smother young wild trout that hide in spaces between rocks, said state biologist Chip Corsi.

It was Corsi who asked the highway crew to dig the pond deeper, so it could be stocked with hatchery trout. He was unaware of the water quality problem. That was discovered on Tuesday by Mike Hartz of the Idaho Division of Environmental Quality.

“The concentrations in that pond were pretty darned high. It’s just not appropriate to be working on exposed slopes in that kind of rain,” Hartz said. “I think we’ll see the water clear up pretty rapidly.”

, DataTimes