WASHINGTON — With the snowmelt from last month’s blizzard having moved downstream, the restoration of Klingle Creek in Northwest is moving full bore toward a springtime finish line.
The deep cuts in the creek’s banks have been smoothed, its bottom has been riffled with stones and boulders, and most of the creek has been regraded.
Last month’s blizzard was more of a boon than a setback for the Klingle Valley Trail Project through Cleveland Park. Work was only delayed a couple of days and the runoff provided an opportunity to test newly installed erosion controls.
“When we got all that warm weather and the snow started melting, that’s when we started getting a lot of flow inside the stream. The pools filled up, but they acted exactly as designed,” says Geoff Pelletier, the District Department of Transportation Construction Manager for the project. “It doesn’t have that erosive force that it used to have.”
The step pools and other new stream features in Klingle Creek withstood the runoff very well, even though the restoration is only about 50 to 75 percent complete, Pelletier says.
Crews recently completed stream bank armoring in various locations and installed a riffle grade control feature, a channel where a mix of river rocks and small boulders slow the flow of water.
The project calls for the restoration of the stream to take place during the winter months to prevent a disruption to the ecosystem in the spring.
“We don’t have grass and trees planted in there yet but [the new features] still performed really well so it’s a good sign of what’s going to come when the project’s complete.”
As the stream restoration enters the final stretch, the demolition of a Washington ghost road will commence in the spring. Klingle Road, closed in 1991 after flood damage, will be replaced with a multi-use trail.
“We have to finalize some more details on the stream and some utility work that’s going on around it but we’re aiming for some time around the middle of April or even May to start removing the road but there’s still quite a bit of work to do before we get there. Once we remove it we’ll start moving toward actually building the trail itself,” Pelletier says.
Construction of the trail alongside the stream is tentatively scheduled to begin by summer.
Crews will work from west to east, beginning near the Woodley Park Towers near Connecticut Avenue. The trail’s surface will be water permeable to further reduce the effects of runoff.
The entire project is expected to wrap up next winter.
