Charles City fish hatchery endures

CHARLES CITY -- Harrison Lake National Fish Hatchery was created during the Depression with a water-supply system dating to the late 18th century.

And that's what the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is still using today at the Charles City County hatchery, which is helping stock Virginia's rivers with American shad, nursing a fledgling sturgeon fishery and restoring endangered mussels to state tributaries.

Now, some help is coming from Washington to the quaint hatchery on more than 440 acres of what once was part of Berkeley Plantation. President Barack Obama's stimulus package is sending $175,000 to make crucial repairs to a water-supply system for a hatchery born during President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal.

"Stimulus money from FDR was how we got our start," said Michael C. Odom, project leader at the hatchery. "We've come full circle here."

The money for long-deferred maintenance at Harrison Lake is a fraction of the more than $43 million coming to federal programs in Virginia from stimulus money distributed by the U.S. Department of the Interior.

The package includes money for a much-improved heating and cooling system at the Maggie L. Walker National Historic Site in Richmond and a wide range of maintenance at Civil War battlefields run by the National Park Service in Richmond and Petersburg.

"The deferred maintenance list keeps growing," said David Ruth, superintendent of the Richmond National Battlefield Park and the Maggie Walker house. "This gives us a great opportunity to address some of these problems."

The stimulus money also indirectly benefits key state agencies, such as the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries, which hasn't received any direct stimulus aid but cheers any help for the Harrison Lake hatchery. The hatchery works closely with the state agency on major initiatives to benefit the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries, and fisheries that depend on them.

"There's nothing more important to a fish hatchery than its water supply," said David K. Whitehurst, director of wildlife resources at the game department.

Much of the work done at the hatchery depends on water from Harrison Lake, a 90-acre reservoir built on Herring Creek as part of Berkeley in the 1790s. A hand-dug canal from the same period, originally designed to power a plantation mill, is still the sole source of surface water diverted from the lake to the hatchery's shallow ponds and key facilities, such as the one cultivating freshwater mussels.

The rest of the system dates to the hatchery, which opened in 1937. The site underwent a major renovation under President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society program in 1965, and the berm around the lake was repaired in 1989 when it began to fail.

Otherwise, it's the same water-supply system that operated when the first president, George Washington, was still in office.

"The canal can supply it," said Odom, who has worked at the hatchery for 15 years, including 10 as a field biologist. "It's a reliability issue."

Those issues include:

• An open-air canal that hasn't been cleared of debris in five years, as well as a problem with stormwater runoff that muddies the canal water because of a culvert that failed more than 10 years ago.

• A corroded canal culvert beneath the hatchery's driveway that Odom once had to clear of a beaver dam by hand while using a snorkel that sucked in hovering spiders. ("That was probably the most unpleasant job I've ever done here," he said.)

• A series of water-intake structures that suffer from design flaws that make maintenance tough, as well as crumbling concrete and broken stop valves.

• A concrete and wood stop-log from the mid-1930s that has been undermined by water flowing around and beneath it. The stop-log is crucial for controlling the water level in the supply canal.

"I'm going to lose it soon," Odom said of the stop-log. "It's going to blow out. I won't be able to divert water."

Odom has engaged an engineer to visit the hatchery at the end of this month to talk about possible solutions to the problems, such as redesigning intake grates to make maintenance easier, clearing debris from the canal and possibly restoring a culvert to divert muddy runoff, put a new larger culvert beneath the drive, and completely replacing the stop-log.

Water from the lake is the cheapest and most efficient way to support many of the hatchery's operations, from the mussel project to the ponds for outdoor education of schoolchildren. The hatchery uses groundwater for some programs, such as shad and sturgeon, but the water chemistry doesn't work with mussels and the operating costs are much higher than the canal's simple gravity flow.

"Without water, I don't do my job," Odom said.

Contact Michael Martz at (804) .