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Students Work to Halt Erosion at Mirror Pond in Oxford

July 05, 2011 - Oxford — The final piece of a four-year-long program to prevent beach and road erosion from Tiger Hill has been completed with a student project at Mirror Pond.

“We worked from top to bottom. This was the last piece of a big project,” said Terri Coolidge Marin, president of the Green and Mirror Ponds Association, speaking at Oxford Hills Comprehensive High School of students' Mirror Pond Campground beach erosion project.

Students in John Haley's atmospheric and space science class took on the project as part of their year-long study of erosion that began last fall with research into how phosphorus, a pollutant present in soil, affects lakes and fish.

The problem began on the hillside above the campground and Old County Road, said Marin, who has lived on the road for years and watched the devastation the runoff has caused.

“For over 30 years the erosion coming off the hillside from Tiger Hill Road washed out Old County Road several times a year, carrying pollutants and dirt into Mirror Pond," Marin said. She noted that the overall project probably saved the town hundreds of thousands of dollars in road repairs from washouts. "Over the past four years the association, working together with the Ayotte family and campground managers, installed open-top box culverts, log and rock water bars, a galvanized culvert and hay-bale check dams.”

“It's been an ongoing problem we're having with the erosion,” said Carol Watson of Paris, who takes care of the campground during the summer. “It wiped out the beach area. It's taken a toll for the past couple of years.”

This spring, the students completed the last piece of the project with the erosion control piece at the Mirror Pond beach.

“After visiting Mirror Pond, students began to research ways to prevent erosion in a large plantless area on the lake shore,” Haley said. “Small groups of students presented their solutions for the erosion problem and the best solution was chosen by a small panel of experts in the field.”

Michele Windsor of Oxford County Soil and Water Conservation District, who was involved in various stages of the project, said on Monday that the agency was called in as technical professionals to evaluate the students' plans to landscape the area to prevent erosion. “We took the best elements of their plans,” she said, in developing an overall scheme that included a curved pathway and native plants to stop the water flow.

The project was funded with the KIDS Consortium using two grants — one from the Dara J. Kaufman Fund, which encourages young people in New England to take action to make their schools and communities caring, supportive and environmentally sustainable places, and a Green Schools Mini-Grant that helps educators implement environmentally focused service-learning projects.

KIDS (for kids involved doing service learning) is an agency founded in 1992 that serves schools and community organizations in Maine and beyond with a local office in Auburn.

With the funding in place and support from the Green Pond and Mirror Pond Lakes Association, the students were able to plan out the process and last month put the project into action.

Several dozen students went to the campground with shovels and rakes and spent a morning this spring terracing the area and planting native plants that were supplied by the Oxford County Soil and Water Conservation District and creating an erosion path to help preserve the beach. They finished the morning with a luncheon provided by Hannaford.

The students were excited about their project's effect on the community, said Haley, who said one of his students, Carolyn Lamb, told him, “It was a good way to help out the community.” Another student, Charles Noble, said “I thought it was fun and interesting. A good way to help out the community.”

Marin called it a “win-win” situation for everyone.

“The kids were wonderful,” Watson said. “I''m serious. Those kids did a wonderful job. It was a great day.”

Leslie H. Dixon, Sun Journal, July 2011

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