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A tour of Labarque and Fox Creeks was part of the pre-event for 2003’s Water Quality Symposium.
Engineers, consultants, planners, environmentalists and local government officials met in Eureka and traveled by bus to sites in northern Jefferson County and southern St. Louis County where they were led on the tour by Tracy Boaz of the Missouri Conservation Department, Kevin Meneau, Missouri Department of Conservation, Shawn Sullivan, SCI Engineering, Inc, and David Wilson of East-West Gateway.
The watershed tour looked at LaBargue Creek in Jefferson County and the first healthy tributary ( as determined by sampling of fish populations) to
the Meramec - 40 miles from the mouth at the Mississippi River. The group also visited the Young Conservation Area, managed by MDC, where over the last dozen years, stream back stabilization and restoration
was implemented by the MDC after acquiring this land that had previously been farmed.
Next, the tour went to Fox Creek where we saw the first stream bank mitigation project established in the United States. Fox creek, at mile 44
on the Meramec is also a healthy stream, and the stream bank
project will take about 80 acres of an 800 acre farm in St. Louis County soon to be annexed by Eureka and developed. The mitigation project will protect a corridor along the creek and provide continual monitoring of stream quality.
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