Marsh project earns Fermilab an environmental award

The Nepese Marsh in the Fermilab Village in June. The Marsh was once a sewage treatment area.

Turning a sewage treatment area into a wildlife haven that reduces greenhouse gases has helped to save the laboratory money and earned Fermilab regional and national recognition.

Later today, Roads and Grounds employee Dave Shemanske will accept a natural landscaping award from the Chicago Wilderness Congress and the U.S. EPA on the laboratory's behalf for the Nepese Marsh Restoration Project in the Fermilab Village.

During Fermilab's first few decades, the pond behind the village was used as a sewage treatment area. Aerators in the 4- to 5-acre area kept water moving to break down sewage.

Connecting to Warrenville's sewer system in the 1990s made the pond obsolete. Converting it saved the laboratory about $4,000 a year in operating costs.

"We thought we could save the laboratory money by eliminating this equipment. If we turned it back into a marsh, plants could do the same thing - break down raw sewage," Shemanske said.

In 1999, Roads and Grounds employees pumped down the oxidation pond's 4.5 feet of water and sewage. They piled up the sludge and let it dry out, creating islands inside the oxidation pond area.

Bob Betz, former founder and leader of Fermilab's Prairie Restoration Project, and his interns collected wetland species before winter that year and heavily seeded the space. Shemanske continues that work, spending his lunch hours and free time collecting plants and heavily seeding the marsh.

"Dr. Betz had an influence on a lot of us," Shemanske said. "We're raised on a construction background with blacktop and concrete. Most construction groups would have gotten a bulldozer and filled that in, but the new maintenance focus is to go green."

The area has become a favored birding spot. Fermilab Natural Areas hopes to raise funds to build a walking path and benches there.

"This space is coming along nicely," said Rod Walton, Fermilab ecologist. "It increases our biodiversity. Although small, it soaks up carbon and doesn't heat the atmosphere like blacktop would."

Shemanske feels honored to accept the award. "We strive to keep Fermilab a world-class site doing world-class physics," he said.

--Rhianna Wisniewski

The oxidation pond, or sewage treatment area, before it was converted into a marsh.

Where do science supermachines go when they die?

From New Scientist, Nov. 2, 2008

Like a man hoping to find a second-hand sports car at a knockdown price, Lon Morgan used to regularly peruse the for-sale ads in Commerce Business Daily. Then one day in 1995, Morgan saw exactly what he had been looking for and submitted a bid. Three weeks later, Morgan and his company International Isotopes were the proud owners of parts from the world's biggest atom smasher for the princely sum of $4.5 million.

Morgan had bought part of the defunct Superconducting Super Collider, a behemoth of a machine designed to search for the much vaunted Higgs boson, aka the God particle, which is supposed to give all other particles their mass. When funding for the 87-kilometre-round SSC was slashed in 1993 a cool $2 billion had already been spent. Now the huge tunnels in Waxahachie, Texas, sat dark and empty. Since the parts for the accelerator had never actually been assembled into a working machine, they sat crated up in a warehouse, awaiting their new owner and their new destiny.

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