Defending the floodplain
U.S. Army Reserve combat engineers take down levee to help restore creek in Susquehanna River watershed
In August 2021, 36 soldiers moved into the brooder houses at the Proctor Game Farm in Plunketts Creek, Pennsylvania. They weren’t bunking with pheasants — the state had closed down the facility a decade earlier.
The soldiers, members of the Army Reserves’ 333rd Engineer Company 1st Platoon, based in Reading, Pennsylvania, had a mission: take down the 2,200-foot-long levee between the creek and the game farm that triggered flooding at the site after heavy rains in 2011, and several times since.
But the reason they were there in the first place was Brandon Bleiler, a heavy equipment operator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Pennsylvania Field Office. He was their First Sergeant.
High water
Several years after the closure of the game farm, local partners were struggling to find a way to remove the levee, originally built in the 1930s and reinforced in the early 1970s in the wake of Hurricane Agnes.
Ironically, it was intended to reduce flooding.
Instead, “It ended up causing erosion on both sides of the creek, affecting our property and our neighbors,” explained Rodney Mee, a game warden for the Pennsylvania Game Commission.
The levee was blocking the creek from its floodplain — the adjacent low-lying area where a river can spread out, diffusing excess energy during intense storms. Like an emergency exit, for water.
Without that natural outlet, Mee explained, “The water blows through like it’s coming out of a firehose.”
During the 2011 storm that sealed the game farm’s fate, the water rose 30 feet, overtopping the levee and causing significant damage to the surrounding area as it rushed to escape the confines of the creek.
In 2017, the state and the local conservation district approached the Northcentral Pennsylvania Conservancy about a potential solution. The Conservancy had money from an oil-spill mitigation fund to support an unspecified water-quality improvement project in the community.
It seemed like a perfect fit.
“Plunketts Creek is a high-quality, cold-water fishery, with naturally occurring brown and brook trout,” said Renee Carey, executive director of the Conservancy.
But even though erosion from high-water events was impacting both water temperature and depth, it turned out the creek wasn’t impaired enough to meet the bar for the fund.
“It came down to everybody recognizing that it would cost a lot more than we thought,” Carey said. An estimated $300,000.
Levee it to us
When Bleiler visited the site in 2019 shortly after starting his position with the Service, the Army Reserves seemed like the natural solution.
Soldiers in the Army Reserves receive the same basic and advanced training as those on active duty, then return to their civilian lives, spending one weekend a month and two weeks a year training to reinforce their specialized skills. As combat engineers, the members of Bleiler’s company prepare to lay the groundwork for battle — building fortifications, clearing air strips, and developing roads and trails.
Training for those tasks requires moving a lot of dirt, and, as Bleiler explained, “Most of the time, it’s just training for the sake of training — we’ll just go to an open area, dig a hole, fill it back in with dirt.”
At Plunketts Creek, he recognized an opportunity to leverage training requirements to solve the funding problem — the soldiers’ time would be paid for by the Department of Defense, so long as the project received approval from the Pentagon, the only cost to partners would be covering food, housing, and fuel.
But there was added value for the soldiers as well.
“Finding a project that is enduring and accomplishes something of value is really powerful,” Bleiler said. “When soldiers can see results of their work, it boosts morale and helps with retention.”
It also brings visibility to the otherwise unseen work Army Reserve Soldiers put in to prepare for deployment, outside of their regular jobs.
Common ground
During the project, the soldiers were hard to miss. They moved into the brooder houses with air mattresses, ACs, grills, smokers, not to mention the fleet of excavators, bulldozers, graders, and other heavy equipment. The site became a draw for the community, and something to rally around.
“I was a little nervous about feeding 30 to 40 guys for two weeks, so I reached out to a number of partners in the community for help,” said Carey from the Northcentral Pennsylvania Conservancy, who handled the project funding and logistics.
She worked with local restaurants and businesses to provide dinners every day, either fully cooked meals, or food the soldiers could grill. While the soldiers were in town, the local fire company held two fundraising dinners for the community and dropped off cooked meals at the game farm — including Thanksgiving dinner.
Carey also reached out to the American Legion. “Conservation is not their world, but they were thrilled to contribute,” she said. They also gladly accepted an invitation to visit the site on the same evening as the local men’s club for a tour led by Bleiler in fatigues.
Thanks half a million
Three weeks after the soldiers arrived, the levee was gone — a feat that involved moving 22,000 cubic yards of debris. To put that in perspective, the volume of the bed of a typical pick-up truck is 2.5 cubic yards.
When the last dump truck drove away and the dust settled, Bleiler gave Carey a spreadsheet breaking down the number of hours the soldiers spent on the project.
“To cover the labor alone, it would have cost us $536,000,” Carey said. “They saved us hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
A few weeks after the soldiers completed their mission, Hurricane Ida brought record rainfall to Northcentral Pennsylvania.
After the storm passed, Carey’s phone rang. It was the neighbor on the other side of the creek, informing her that the area where the levee used to be was covered with water. They thought they were delivering bad news.
“I literally jumped for joy,” Carey said. “I said, ‘It’s working! We flooded it!’”
Leaving a legacy
Removal of the levee was the first step toward a new life for the site. The game farm days are over, but the cold-water creek offers prime trout fishing, now with easier access, and two large spoil piles left by the soldiers will be used to lay the groundwork for upland pollinator habitat.
“It’s unique to have this kind of open grassland, where you typically have woods — lots of species will use that,” said Mee, the state game warden.
He said there’s also budding interest in repurposing the old brooder houses for a training facility, with classrooms, cafeterias, and bunkhouses. The precedent has been set.
Whether people come to fish, or to attend a training, they’ll see signs of what took place there in August 2021 — not just the functioning floodplain, but the big boulder excavated from beneath the levee, that now sits by the road. It’s painted with the emblem of the Army Reserves’ 333rd Engineer Company 1st Platoon.
