T-L Photo/GAGE VOTA Miller Excavating and Demolition and Theaker Excavating complete a dredging project at St. Clairsville’s main reservoir.

ST. CLAIRSVILLE — After a lengthy delay, the main St. Clairsville reservoir has been dredged.

Completion of the project occurred Friday after months of unexpected setbacks.

Miller Excavating and Demolition was awarded the bid to dredge the reservoir, or remove sediment and debris from the bottom of the lake, for the amount of $132,934 in December but due to unexpected delays decided to team up with Theaker Excavating to expedite the process.

St. Clairsville Service Director Scott Harvey said he couldn’t thank Miller and Theaker enough for collaborating to get the project completed and added that the project went off without a hitch.

“They got 8,000 cubic yards of dirt out, which is more than we hoped. We originally looked at getting somewhere around 5,400 cubic yards of sediment out,” Harvey said. “Miller and Theaker worked together on it flawlessly.”

He added that the extra cubic yards will allow the reservoir to obtain more water.

“We picked up roughly about a week’s worth of water in the reservoir,” he said.

Since the drought that occurred this past summer, the city of St. Clairsville has been purchasing water from Belmont County but has stopped since the start of the dredging project.

Harvey said the city decided to stop purchasing water from the county in order to get the reservoir as low as possible to be able to dredge it.

“We were buying from the county, but we discontinued that to keep the reservoir down while they were digging and using our own water to keep it down. But even with that we couldn’t stop it. It wanted to keep filling back up,” Harvey said. “We were kind of fighting against time, and it was starting to fill up on its own no matter what we did.”

He added that on Friday he and his team saw the forecast for the weekend, which included rain that turned into snow, but were luckily able to complete the job before the weather impacted its progress.

Following the completion of the project, the excess amount of water that was being held in the Provident reservoir was pumped back into the main reservoir.

“We started pumping our Provident reservoir over because it was getting to the point it was going to overflow,” Harvey said. “We didn’t want to lose that water, so once they quit on Friday we started pumping that water over and then with all the water it’s pretty much full.”

He then said that he was shocked at how fast the main reservoir filled up after months of being depleted.