The Pump Station!

 

 

 The Pump Station was built in 1961 by the Army Corp of Engineers as part of the Five Mile Creek Watershed project. To preserve the Mucklands in Prattsburgh and Wheeler. It replaced a gravity fed system that was inadequate  to drain the 550 acres drained swamp. It was referred to in Prattsburgh Folklore as the Great Swamp! It is currently powered by 2 200hp diesel powered pumps. One primary pump pumps 18000 gallons per minute and the secondary pump pumps 28000 gallons per minute. That pump is used for flash flood situations. 

The swamp is protected  by a manmade dike that is roughly 5 miles around the perimeter of the mucklands.  The 550 acres of land has 12 cisterns that connect underground drainage to cisterns  that pump to the dike.  A unique feature of the Prattsburgh Muck is that there is a ditch that divides the muck into three townships, Prattsburgh, Wheeler and Urbana.

Over the last 3 years all the drainage systems have been up dated. That’s another story to be told.

Without the pump station and all of the drainage the muck looks like these photos of flooding before the new drainage systems were installed.

Guest writer today is Greg Squires.