WINNECONNE (NBC 26) — The Winneconne Breakwall project is a 2,500-foot rock wall built to prevent erosion from degrading the shoreline wetland, while fostering a diverse aquatic habitat and preventing phosphorus pollution from spreading through the lake.
- The Winneconne Breakwall Project is expected to be completed this month.
- Since 1998, Winnebago County has built about 7 miles of breakwalls throughout the Lake Winnebago system.
- The project costs $860,000, paid for by federal, county and private funds.
Each day, dump trucks bring loads of rock to the Northwest shore of Lake Winneconne. The rock is dumped in the water, then backhoes push the rocks together to form a wall.
The finished project will be made of more than 11,000 tons of rock, according to the director of Winnebago County Land and Water Conservation, Chad Casper.
“We put in a rock structure that is built close to the historic wetland line, where the wetlands used to be,” Casper says.
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The breakwall prevents wind, water, and wave erosion from eating away at the shoreline wetland.
“Since 1941, this specific site has lost 33 acres of wetland,” Casper says.
More than preventing erosion, Casper says the breakwall creates a diverse plant community that helps fish and wildlife thrive.
Plus, the native plants help absorb phosphorus, which can prevent harmful algal blooms throughout the entire Lake Winnebago system.
“It’s about a 6,000 square mile area that drains into the Winnebago system, so there's a lot of runoff that ends up here, and we call that legacy phosphorus,” Casper says. “So on the bottom, you have that in the sediment, and that gets churned up with the wind and wave action, and by having these breakwalls in place, those plants hold that sediment in place and help take up some of that legacy phosphorus.”
The Lake Winneconne Breakwall Project costs $860,000, according to Casper.
They received federal funds for the project, donations from Lake Poygan Sportsmen’s Club, Duck Unlimited, and the private landowners, and $360,000 from county funds.
“It might not be something that people are thinking of right away in terms of what the county does, but it's so important when we look at the restoration of natural habitat, the impact on water quality, the impact that recreational tourism has in terms of fishing and wildlife,” Winnebago County Executive Gordon Hintz says.
Since 1998, Winnebago County has installed 7 miles of breakwall across the Winnebago System, according to Casper.
“We restored almost 500 acres where it was open water and now it’s a diverse ecosystem of plants, and we’ve protected over 1,000 acres of wetlands,” Casper says. “It’s pretty unique to the Midwest, these types of projects that we’re doing.”
