I'd say that the controversy about sand and gravel dredging is a very active controversy throughout this region, that it has a lot to do with the way we view rivers in terms of resources for private industry, for public use as opposed to resources for recreation and resources for nature and animals.

Wakefield Dort: The sand is absolutely necessary for construction, because it has to go into concrete. And it is easiest to mine it from the river because all you have to do is pump it up and separate the water out -- and the large pieces -- and the sand is then available.

Robert Smith: We've been in a construction boom for a number of years now and a lot of this material is going into homes. Other materials are going into the construction of roads and of course we have a lot of industrial construction going on. Anywhere they're building structures, they're probably using sand and gravel.

THE U.S. ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS HAS BEEN RESPONSIBLE FOR REGULATING DREDGING ACTIVITIES ON THE KANSAS RIVER SINCE THE EARLY 1970s. ROBERT SMITH OF THE CORPS EXPLAINS THAT THERE ARE ALTERNATIVES TO MINING SAND FROM THE KAW.

Robert: We really have three possibilities. You can crush stone from a quarry. You can create sand and gravel that way. It's typically of a very low hardness -- it's not a very hard material and generally not very suitable for most types of construction. You can go into the flood plain to obtain your material. It's probably material that is as good as what you're getting out of the river but it's more costly. And then of course you have the river operation itself. One of the neat things about the material that they get from the Kansas River is that it's almost entirely usable material.

Wakefield: Furthermore, the river keeps replenishing the supply of sand, bringing more down from upstream. Whereas if you mine on dry land, you're creating a hole which is going to remain and has to be used for something else or in some way taken care of.

PROFESSOR OF GEOLOGY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS, WAKEFIELD DORT SPECIALIZES IN SURFACE PROCESSES. HE EXPLAINS THAT ONE OF THE CONCERNS PEOPLE HAVE ABOUT IN-STREAM MINING IS ITS AFFECT ON STREAMBANK EROSION.

Wakefield: Is it normal river behavior -- river process-- that's cutting in on the outside of a curved bank, for instance? Is it the way the water volume is being controlled by the discharge from the reservoirs? Is it the in-stream removal of gravel? And I think we have to say, yes, it's all of those. And probably some other effects, too.

Now the simplest interpretation of fundamental principles of stream flow says that if you remove bed load or suspended load from a river channel, that has to be replaced from somewhere because the river is going to "carry" everything that it has the power to carry. So if that is true, then when sand is removed artificially, there will be erosion of the sides of the channel in that area and also what is called a head cut, that is, the upstream edge of the erosion area will migrate upstream.

Robert: They're required to obtain a permit from us before they can dredge. We look at the morphology of the river to see whether dredging would adversely impact the system itself. We want to assure that it's not going to cause an unacceptable amount of bed degradation, which is lowering of the river bed. We don't want to destabilize the river banks if we can avoid it. We're trying to look at any issues that might arise from the activity. We have to look at economic issues. What happens if you deny the permit? How does it affect employment? We've denied one permit in the reach of river located between the city of Lawrence and Lecompton. It was denied because of the recreational value of the river.

Sam Seagraves: I've probably canoed the Kansas River more than any other river. The thing that makes this stretch of the river so much nicer than, say, the stretch right in Topeka or below Lawrence down to Kansas City is the lack of any industrial development.

IN 1994, A GROUP OF NEIGHBORS IN THE KANSAS RIVER BOTTOMS NORTH OF LAWRENCE UNITED TO OPPOSE THE LOCATION OF A NEW DREDGING OPERATION ON A RELATIVELY UNTOUCHED SEGMENT OF THE RIVER. THE "FRIENDS OF THE KAW" STRIVE TO PRESERVE THE KANSAS RIVER FOR WILDLIFE AND RECREATIONAL PURPOSES. CANOER SAM SEAGRAVES WAS ONE OF THE ORIGINAL MEMBERS OF FRIENDS OF THE KAW.

Sam: In the wintertime the eagles come down here and fish. There's a lot of ducks in the area and a lot of gulls and the eagles also will feed on the ducks and the gulls. If they were allowed to dredge in this area, they would dig a deep hole into the bottom of the river and there wouldn't be any more shallow, sandy mud flats, they would gradually turn the river into a deeper, channelized river so the very nature of the river itself would be compromised.

Cynthia: There's about 80 species of fish in the Kansas River -- not too many people know that's that diverse. And it's a very interesting fish assemblage because it's adapted to these sandy-bottomed rivers. The fish around here are actually evolved in very turbid systems with a lot of mud in the water. And as we've been dredging it, there's been a fairly major change in the habitat for the fish. We've gone from a very shallow, sandy river with a lot of backwaters and small channels and graded areas to, in many places, a deeper channel. And that radically alters the fish that occur in it.

CYNTHIA ANNETT IS PROFESSOR OF SYSTEMATICS AND ECOLOGY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS.

Cynthia: I would say that in terms of a shallow water fish fauna and in terms of diversity of birds species that are dependent upon that, the best thing is a shallow, sandy river with lots of sand bars. If those are our values, then removing the sand is going to be a bad thing. If we have other values in this society, such as moving water out as quickly as possible, then a deep channel is good. But we can't ask a river to simultaneously give us sand and give us shallow water fish species. They're contradictory.

Sam: Another thing that dredging does to the river, of course, is it makes it unsafe for people to use the river. They string a pontoon bridge completely across the river with a pipe running in it that they suck the sand out of the bottom of the river and the sand and water run up through the pipe to the processing plant that's on the bank of the river. All of this is held in place by cables that come from the sand dredging plant on the bank, they attach them to trees along the bank and then they run them out to the actual dredge that sits out on the river. And these cables, some of them are under water and they'll pop up and down and you never know when they'll come up or down and it could be a real hazard to small boats especially that are on the river.

Robert: I think that people that use the river for recreation, they want a place to go where they're not intruded upon by any noise or any structures in the river. Certainly where there's no element of danger to them other than perhaps the normal hazards associated with boating. I think the dredgers are just trying to earn a living. There's a demand for their materials and I suspect until the demand goes away, they'll be on the river or at least until we identify problems associated with their operations that would force us to deny their permits.

Wakefield: It's a multifaceted problem that we're looking at. How to control the river, how to preserve the environment, how to get sand for construction, and how to make a profit for the companies that are doing the extraction.