When it comes to versatility, erosion control contractors rely on silt fence and wattles-or other rolled or berm-shaped filtration products-as the workhorses of a job site. They are used as sediment barriers, as check dams to slow the flow of water and sediment (placed perpendicular to the downhill flow of the water), and as perimeter guards around construction sites. They are sometimes placed around inlets to stop sediment and debris from entering the storm drain.
Wattles are commonly made from natural fiber like straw, rice straw, or coir and often encased in some type of netting, although companies such as Filtrexx International manufacture geotextile tubes filled with compost. Sandbags and gravel bags also are used for sediment control.
Wattles that are biodegradable can be left on the site once the work is done. They are commonly used in fire-affected areas-especially on slopes and hillsides-to trap soil and sediment left exposed after a wildfire.
The most commonly used sediment control product on construction sites is silt fence. Newer types of silt fence and new mechanical installation methods have come on the market. Yet even some common sediment control devices have come under fire for failing due to improper installation.
That was a painful lesson for Mike Zock, who operates Mazcon near Pittsburgh, PA. He discovered early on that there’s a high price to be paid for improperly functioning silt fence-figuratively and literally.
“We’re former high-tech engineering type people,” he says of the company he started seven years ago. “There are not very many of us, but we do project management and business development, and we started getting into residential development, which was a big thing to get into at the time,” he says.
There were many affordable housing projects and residential development-a lot of business growth. His company started handling residential developments and managing projects for large developers. Along the way, the company was introduced to site work, stormwater management, erosion control, pipe installation, and earthmoving.
Then came a few projects where the silt fence the company had been using failed.
“Right out of the chute, we really got our clocks cleaned out on a couple of jobs where silt fence failed,” Zock says. “We had gotten shut down.
“We were supposed to be managing the schedule, making sure people get paid, and we’ve got this wonderfully engineered plan that developers paid big money to get designed, engineered, and approved. At the end of the day, the best insurance they’ve got in the field is silt fence, and it was woefully inadequate.”
At that point, Zock’s company began investigating alternatives.
“We looked at various things, including straw wattles and compost filter sock. We kept going back to compost filter sock-to its weight, its mass, the fact that it can be recycled.”
The company began using compost filter socks in 2006-specifically, Filtrexx’s SiltSoxx-and hasn’t been fined since.
SiltSoxx came on the market about five years ago and recently became available on pallets. That enables contractors such as Zock to rely on other installation methods than a blower truck.
“Although this competes somewhat with wattles, we really do not see wattles that much here in the East,” says Rod Tyler, chief executive officer of Filtrexx. “Wattles, silt fence, and our SiltSoxx all compete for sediment control applications.”
Zock says he finds SiltSoxx to be a heavier-weight product that moves less, requires less staking, and is successful in filtering. The 150-foot sections are fast and efficient to install. The continuous sections offer him less concern about overlap and less chance of getting fines, he adds. “At the end of the day, it’s easier to install and it’s going to create a situation where you’re less likely to have a failure.”
“We’ve had great protection, and we’ve done some very interesting projects,” Zock notes.
The state of Pennsylvania is specifying compost filter sock on an increasing basis, he says. One project in Pennsylvania is the Marcellus Shale for gas exploration. This unit of marine sedimentary rock contains a large amount of untapped natural gas reserves.
The Marcellus Shale encompasses lower New York to Pennsylvania, extends south into West Virginia, and includes some of western Maryland and eastern Ohio.
“It is explosive in terms of business in the amount of natural gas that’s being produced and the amount of site work that’s being done,” says Zock.
In early 2008, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection agreed to use compost filter sock on that site, Zock says.
“We took that cue to begin aggressively talking with engineers, developers, and regulatory people about the importance of compost filter sock. In Pennsylvania, as of the end of 2010, 2.4 million feet of compost filter sock had been used for perimeter control,” he says.
That’s a switch from earlier times, he says, when “if you put in something that wasn’t silt fence, people questioned you. Today, the norm in many cases in Pennsylvania is compost filter sock, and what’s interesting about it is that many questions have been answered about the viability of this ramp-up of the technology in terms of its proliferation, its scalability, feedstocks, pricing, distribution, and longevity in the field.
“Pennsylvania has proven that all of those questions are answered satisfactorily with 440 miles of compost filter sock going down in this state in 2010. That’s a whole lot of erosion control and perimeter control, and it’s working well.”
Zock is taking the story of success of compost filter sock in Pennsylvania to surrounding states where site work will be done on Marcellus Shale, as well as to other states. He says while some compare SiltSoxx to straw wattles, he does not draw that comparison. “Straw wattles are much lighter, they break down faster, and there’s a lot of hand work involved,” he says. “You don’t have any of that with compost filter sock.”
He also likes that SiltSoxx is available nationally on pallets as a commodity product through distributors. His company now not only installs the product, but also distributes it.
“For years, a crew would have to come out to a job site and install SiltSoxx in the field with big blower trucks,” says Zock. “Some people didn’t like that, and sometimes it was hard to get scheduled. That’s all changed.”
Filtrexx still has professionally certified teams all over the United States doing advanced applications for streambank restoration jobs, wetland recharging, steep slope stabilization, spill clean up, and stormwater filtration, he adds.
A new way that SiltSoxx are being used is as a pyramid to create a type of filtration berm. “A classic sediment trap is a small pond or depression with a big dirt berm around it,” Zock says. “Where water would flow into pipes or channels to put the water in that little basin, typically the dewatering structure of such a device is a riser pipe with a trash rack, anti-vortex plate, or a rock check dam surrounding a riser pipe with holes in it, so there is a single point-source release outside or somewhere downstream of this sediment trap.
“Historically, that put you in a situation of having to manage [the location] downstream where the single-point-source release can cause more erosion.”
When a pyramid of filter socks is constructed, he explains, “The dewatering structure, instead of a single-point-source release from a traditional trap, is a level spread release through a filtration berm. The water is cleaner, the water gets level spread release, we don’t have a buildup of energy to cause downstream erosion, and it’s easier to take out.
The technique is in use at the Indiana County (Pennsylvania) Jimmy Stewart Airport, where 10 such pyramids were installed a few years ago for a runway expansion project near a sensitive wetland area.
“It’s a very popular application,” Zock points out. “You pyramid it up to create various heights so that you can hold the amount of water you want and dewater that trap at the correct rate.”
To manage the stormwater, the traps were placed close to the sensitive area. “The danger is if you have that single pipe as a single-point source being released that close to a wetland, you could really mess up that wetland if you get erosion below the trap,” Zock says. “The answer was literally going very close to the wetland and creating the pyramids of berms and traps. The water on the trap side was murky brown, water coming through the filter berm was fairly clean, and the water being released through the trap was great.”
Zock says the SiltSoxx are more affordable now than ever before. Five years ago, someone using compost socks had to spend extra money by getting new products, hiring installers, and using newly purchased equipment, he says.
“Today, not so much,” he adds. “A typical 8-inch sock in most markets in the United States would sell on a pallet for a retail price of about $2.25 a foot and is installed for probably $2.50 to $2.75 a foot. Most people will tell you $2 to $2.25 a foot to buy the commodity is pretty affordable.”
In contrast, he says, “In most places in Pennsylvania, being the project manager for developers, we would typically pay from $7.50 to $10 a linear foot for super silt fence to be installed on jobs. We can go out and put 24-inch compost filter sock at about the same price at $8 to $8.50 per foot and it’s much more robust. It won’t blow over or push over. It’s a big fat log that sits on the ground and handles a tremendous amount of lateral force when you push against it.”
Another factor to consider with affordability is the removal at the end of the job, says Zock. “I can tell you from that experience I typically need to get a backhoe or a skid-steer or a couple of guys to get out there to rip the super silt fence out at the end of a job.
With compost filter sock, I send a laborer out there with a utility knife. He splits up the sock, pulls out the compost, we pull out the jersey tubing, and I save a bunch of money at the removal at the end.”
Zock has seen sediment built up against compost filter socks and has rolled the sock away from it, scooped out the sediment, and rolled the sock back in place.
“Even with the larger sock, it’s easy to remove,” he adds. “It’s very hard to remove sediment that’s built up against typical silt fence and then expect that silt fence to survive another major sediment push.”
Zock also finds the compost sock to be versatile. “Because it lays on the ground flat, if you need to drive a machine through the area where there is sock, you can cut the sock, flop it open, drive the machine through and flop the sock back,” he says. “It’s very easy to work around on the job site. Although not typical, you could pick it up and move it to various places if you needed to.”
His company often keeps 10-foot sections of the sock stockpiled. “If the sock needs to be repaired or reinforced with another piece, it’s easy to manage and repair and it’s easy to reinforce an area where you might need some more protection.”
In choosing an appropriate product for erosion and sediment control, Zock says at the end of the day, it comes down to feasibility.
“Compost filter socks have been around for 10 years,” he says. “It’s improving every day. I think it is going to be the emerging BMP in the next five years.” development in the United States.”
Craig Higgs is president of Bridgetown Farms in Centreville, MD. His company services the Delmarva Peninsula, encompassing Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. The company’s services include providing sediment and erosion control as a bond release service for land developers. When residential or commercial developers are at the end of a project and ready to go, Higgs’s company does the onsite work necessary to get the bond released. The developers pay him a deposit up front and the remainder once the bond is released.
“We work with the inspectors to get the work done,” Higgs says. “The developers have piles of soil that they’re digging into. If they sit unattended for 14 days or more, then they have to be stabilized with silt fence or straw, or seeded. All of the different municipalities or local agencies have different regulations for that, as well as different enforcements. Some are known to enforce very strictly, and some are known not to enforce.”
Higgs often uses different types of silt fence in his work. He obtains it from GETSco, which manufactures a full line of DOT and non-DOT silt fence with custom printing. The company also carries SiltShield.
“It’s an “˜everything at once’ type of situation,” Higgs says of his work. “It’s very seasonal. It’s a very weather-driven type of thing, so we try to be proactive and do prep work in case we have a big rainstorm or snow event, so it’s easier for us to handle during the event.”
Higgs faces an unusual challenge these days. “There are quite a few developments out there right now that are in the middle of foreclosure and bankruptcy proceedings. The developer has a bond, and the property is going through foreclosure through the bank and in most cases it is not even going to get auctioned.
“Now you have a bank sitting there with a bond responsibility. You’ve got a county that doesn’t really care who has it-they just want it taken care of. A lot of times the developers are more knowledgeable than the bank; they are more hands-on.”
Various consultants work with the banks on property issues, and Higgs works with them on some of the bank-owned properties to handle erosion and sediment control situations.
“It gets a little more hairy, because you’ve got homeowners’ associations that are started and homeowners that are in there,” Higgs says. “You might have a 50-lot subdivision with 10 or 12 homeowners in there. You might have some lots that are being sold to investors, so we’ve been trying to jump at the opportunity that is in some of this turmoil right now.”
Environmental concerns underscore the importance of the work. “We’re right by the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean,” says Higgs. “Obviously, we are concerned about the Chesapeake Bay. The Chesapeake Bay watershed ecosystem is a target for federal dollars for critical areas and wetland protection.
“We definitely have a lot that we need to deal with in the matter of stormwater management,” Higgs adds. “We’re a very agricultural area, and there’s a lot of money put into the agricultural community for good water management practices. What’s required of many of these developments is that they have to be maintained.”
Silt fence will always have a place in sediment and erosion control, Higgs says.
“In my opinion, silt fence is the “˜old horse.’ It does work, and it works a lot. There’s a lot of new technology out there these days that is more efficient and has been proven better or as good, but I think silt fence will always have its place.
“The new technologies and new ways of doing things take the place of some of that silt fence. In a development where there is usually 20,000 feet of silt fence, there might still be 5,000 feet, but I think you’re going to see massive areas done in different ways.”
Those ways will decrease and eliminate some of the sedimentation and runoff in an environmentally friendly way, he adds.
“Silt fence has a maintenance component to it,” Higgs acknowledges. “Some of these projects are long-term projects. You can put up 20,000 feet of silt fence, and the project can take 10 years to build out. We can get in some grass buffers and some things like that that are going to require less maintenance. Silt fence is like putting a tourniquet on a bleeding arm. It will stop the bleeding, but if you take it off, it’s going to bleed again.”
What one uses to install a sediment control product is just as critical as the product itself for a project’s success.
Adam Mallard installs silt fence and turbidity barriers for Our Land Environmental in Cocoa, FL, a three-person company that includes his wife Balinda and Brian Amerson. It’s a side business for Mallard, whose day job is working for an underground utility contractor.
Our Land Environmental uses the tommy Silt Fence Machine in its work. Mallard saw it as a way to cut labor and machine rental costs so the company could pursue larger jobs and retain more of its revenues for growth.
“I looked at the silt fence when we started the business, but it wasn’t feasible,” Mallard says. “But then we saw a few jobs coming down the pipe that had very long distances-one of them was 8,000 linear feet and one of them was 14,000 linear feet of silt fence-so we saw the opportunity to use the tommy and bought it.”
Although the larger job fell through, Our Land Environmental was able to pay for the machine through the other job, a highway resurfacing project on Apollo Boulevard in Melbourne.
There was a time benefit as well: The job took three people less than 24 working hours. “In my opinion, the fence is a lot more stable than the standard DOT requirement,” Mallard says, noting that the Florida’s transportation department’s standard for silt fence is a minimum of 60 grain fence fabric with stake spacing every 6 feet.
“I have nothing but good to say about it,” he says of the tommy. “We don’t have to worry about extra labor costs. It”˜s very effective.”
Most of the jobs in which Our Land Environmental is involved include site perimeters and jobs that have yet to be cleared. “The contractor will clear a path, and we put our fence down in the middle of the woods,” says Mallard.
The company has been doing a lot of resurfacing projects recently, protecting nearby wetlands and other environmentally sensitive areas.
“We focus more on county roads with limited traffic where we’re putting silt fence along the side of the road so the paving operation isn’t washing into any adjacent waterway.”
Using the tommy in conjunction with durable fabric makes for greater stability for the silt fence, Mallard says. “It has to have a more durable fabric because of the way it’s being installed. You’re actually installing the stakes in a separate application. They”˜re not coming pre-staked, so when you have an area that gets damaged, it’s much easier to add more stakes and add more fabric; it’s a lot easier to repair.”
To replace the silt fence, Mallard will use a pick axe to retrench and then install the fabric. “We have the extra stakes,” he notes.
“Say that you have more sediment in one area,” he adds. “You can put stakes every 3 feet, adding additional stakes. The tommy is going to place the fabric much better than the typical trencher. When it rolls the fabric in, you know it’s in. You can barely pull it up at all. With a trencher, you could probably pull it up in any given spot, depending on how well you maintain it. People can be very critical of it. If you don’t set it properly, you’re going to end up redoing a lot of it.”
Mallard says that when his company uses the tommy to install the silt fence, they’re getting the J-shaped hook in the fence, making a better barrier.
“The common method to install it is the pre-staked silt fence,” he says. “Most people don’t get the depth that they need to get that J-hook. So the fence stands a lot taller above the ground. One of the criticisms we get is our fence looks lower to the ground because a lot more fabric is pinched in. People keep thinking our fence isn’t tall enough. But we are well into the state requirement of 18 to 24 inches above the ground.
“It just looks funny because most silt fence you see is installed improperly. We pride ourselves in getting it right and training the contractors we’re working for to expect how to install silt fence correctly. I’ve been certified since 2006 to inspect silt fence. I know how to do it and why we do it.”
Mallard says many of the challenges he faces in Florida involve dealing with wetlands and imported soils.
“There is a lot of variation in soils, so you may get a job closer to the beach where a lot of your soils are sandier. When you’re trying to control washout, you may have sandy material underneath the topsoil material that was imported to grow grass, and then the second you change your grades, you’re going to end up with washout,” he says.
Some other areas may have the equivalent of beach sand, Mallard says. “You’re never going to get the material to stay in place, but, in my opinion, if you’re in an area where you’re dealing with beach sand, you’re not really going to deal with erosion, because the moisture is going to settle into the ground.”
Weather can present more challenges.
“When we have wet seasons, they’re very wet and you’re dealing with a lot of rain-up to two inches a day-and it can really change the outlook of your project,” says Mallard. “The heat is battering the silt fence during dry weather, and when a storm comes through, you’re replacing half of it,” he says. “Florida has extreme weather conditions that change in hours, so it’s very hard to predict.”
Mallard says it’s important to get people to understand that silt fence is there to control sediment.
“Wherever the water is flowing, you need to have your stakes on the opposite side pushing against that flow,” he says. “Most people just see silt fence as a line in a spec. They install it and they don’t understand why they are installing it. They just know that someone needed it. Once you tell somebody this is why it’s there and the purpose it’s serving, they get it.”
Learning to install silt fence and learning to use the tommy entails a brief learning curve, Mallard says. “Brian, who is part owner with us, is a firefighter by trade and had never installed silt fence before,” he says. “Now he pretty much will run all of my jobs. That’s in less than two years. As far as the tommy, he learned it on one job and now he can run it efficiently. It’s very easy to learn.”
Because Mallard didn’t want his part-time work to hinder his full-time work, it was important to him to find equipment that would help him from having to hire more labor.
“We’ve been pretty successful in the year and a half we’ve had our business, and I think the tommy has given us a definite advantage,” Mallard says.
Dan Neaton’s company, Neaton Brothers Erosion Control in Mayer, MN, uses a variety of methods for sediment and erosion control.
One of the company’s current jobs is providing perimeter control for a large bypass construction job on State Highway 23 in Paynesville, MN. The job began in spring 2010 and is expected to be a three-year project requiring about 25,000 linear feet of silt fence. The job site encompasses a spawning creek and some wetlands.
Neaton’s choice of silt fence installation equipment is Burchland Manufacturing’s Silt Fence Installer, of which his company owns two.
“It’s solidly built,” he says. “I like that it has a good turning radius. I like the fact that it’s simple. There”˜s not a wheel on the back to bend and break. It slices into the ground a full foot, or deeper if you want it. Usually if you can get it in a foot, it stays in. It seems like once you slice it in and back pack it, you’re not getting it out. I don’t have the undermining issue.
“We put a lot of silt fence in every year and we need our plows to perform day in and day out with as little as maintenance and down time as possible,” he says.
Neaton says the number one failure he sees in silt fence is when it fills up during a heavy rain event. “There might a pooling area at the bottom of the hill, a concentrated water area. Water flows over the fence, comes out the back side, and starts to undermine the soil behind the fence. If it moves or it’s not packed in or is not deep enough, it will wash it out underneath.”
That was one of the factors that sold Neaton on the Burchland installer. “It cuts in nice and deep, and we have virtually zero problems with undermining,” he says.
Neaton often uses other sediment and erosion control methods in conjunction with silt fence, including blankets and sediment ponds. “With any project, it’s hard to sit down and draw it out on paper and think what you come up with is going to work 100%,” Neaton says. “In some spots, it’s perfectly fine by itself. And in other spots, it’s not.”
Neaton believes silt fence should be used as “the last effort, the last barrier.
“If you’ve got a waterway and you’ve got a ditch line that’s discharging into a wetland and you want to put that line of silt fence right before that wetland, that’s fine and dandy,” he adds. “But if you don’t do something ahead of that in that waterway to keep sediment and soils in place, the silt fence is going to be overworked.”
Thus a contractor ends up spending a lot of time and money maintaining the fence, Neaton says.
“That’s the definition of insanity,” he adds. “It rains, the silt fence fills up, and you’ve got to clean it out. It rains, it fills up, you’ve got to clean it out.”
On an active construction site where erosion control measures are already in place, maintenance is usually less of an issue, Neaton points out.
Every project is different, he notes. “If we’re near a wetland, we may dig a sediment pond, give it an area to settle out, and then after a rain event when everything is settled, pump that pond dry so there is a storage area again. You’ve got to go in and find the best way of dealing with it, and you still have to be cost-effective. Nobody has a bottomless checkbook.”
Neaton finds that the cost per square foot of silt fence has come down quite a bit.
“As far as what you’re getting, I don’t think there’s another product out there that would match it,” he says. “It is simple. It’s relatively old technology, but it goes back to “˜why fix it if it’s working,’ and until there’s a better product that can compete in the marketplace, I see it working well.”
The company also uses bags made of geosynthetic material and filled with wood mulch. “They’re usually used along curb lines at housing developments,” Neaton says. “One advantage is if you’ve got a cement truck that’s got to get in the yard, instead of backing over the silt fence or removing all of the posts and taking all of the silt fence out and having to reinstall all of that, you can grab these, get them out of the way, back the truck in, get the truck back out and slide them back over.”
Because they are only 8 inches high, they can only be used in selected areas, he points out. “If it’s a fairly flat lot and there’s not a lot of water running toward it, it works fine,” he says. “But you can’t put them downgrade of a 400-foot waterway and expect them to do anything. You’re asking for too much.”
Keith Kirby, president of Curbco in Swartz Creek, MI, describes his company as being akin to a municipal public works department that provides a variety of solutions for problems pertaining to roads, parking lots, and developed and undeveloped sites. In addition to erosion control, Curbco has four other divisions that provide services in snow and ice removal, pavement/construction, parking lot and street sweeping, and landscaping and horticulture services.
For its sediment and erosion control services, Curbo uses SiltShield, which it has been testing for more than a year, among other approaches.
“We’ve observed how it’s been performing at a number of sites compared to traditional silt fence,” he says. “We’ve used it on smaller sites.
“When I was first exposed to it, there were a number of things about the product that really appealed to me,” Kirby adds. “I’ve told everyone from day one that prices will dictate what product will go in on a job unless you have a unique situation. I feel SiltShield is a product that works for unique situation and gives us as a contractor another tool in the toolbox.”
The soil erosion division of Curbco has been responding to an array of challenges in Michigan over the last several years. Demand has decreased as development has significantly decreased.
But even more challenging for Kirby’s company is the lack of consistency in the enforcement of environmental laws. Michigan is not only the Great Lakes state but also encompasses many other water bodies that require environmental protection.
“Whether in Michigan or different parts of the United States, there are certain areas that are really rigid on it,” Kirby says. “There are other areas that are minimally rigid, and you have some that just turn their heads, especially because the economy has gotten tougher.”
He has seen one community where just three years ago, inspectors were referred to as the “soil erosion police.” These days, all a company needs to do is meet its original installation requirements to get a permit in place, he adds.
Silt fence was viewed as a “nightmare” by some developers, Kirby says. In some communities with stricter enforcement, the company would install thousands of feet of silt fence.
“In one community where we worked, a lot of development took place. Any inspector that you called out from that community-plumbing, electrical, building-the first thing they would do is they would analyze your soil erosion on the site from your silt fence to your silt sacks,” he says.
“If any part of your soil erosion was out of place or not up to specification, they would leave and not give you the inspection for that particular site. You would be charged a reinspection fee. When homes were still selling well five years ago in this community and there was a waiting list, the developer, for two years in a row, had us visit that site one day a week through the prime building season.”
Many of the site’s entrances were required to have silt fence installed, only to have it knocked over by delivery and other trucks.
“I cannot tell you how many thousands of feet of traditional silt fence we put in on five popular intersections of this subdivision when it was going through its high-production development stage. At that time, if we’d had SiltShield available, even though there is a greater cost upfront, in the end, it would have been a great savings.”
Now that he has SiltShield available as an option, Kirby uses it in conditions where a site has a lot of activity and may be rather tight with not a lot of storage area. To allow vehicles to access the site, the stakes can be removed, the material laid down in place, and then easily put back.
“You can’t let an excavator or dozer just wear it out day in and day out, but as far as moving in masonry material or lumber, you lower it down, protect the material with plywood or whatever you may have, run a machine across it and pick it back up, put a few stakes up and get ready to go.”
In contrast, pulling out a traditional silt fence is labor intensive, Kirby says.
“You’re pulling the tail out of the ground and it has to be retrenched or plowed back in a second time and backfilled,” he says. “You’re also breaking half of the stakes you’re taking out, so you have to put new stakes up. With SiltShield, you pull out a couple stakes, lay it down, protect it, pick it back up. It’s very appealing in those applications.”
When it comes to having to filter water as part of sediment control on jobs, Jay Watson, president of Twin Oaks Environmental in Opelika, AL, and an International Erosion Control Association member, likes to use Silt-Saver’s Belted Silt Retention Fence (BSRF).
In 2007, when his company was still located in Florida, Watson first used BSRF on a highway job in Apopka. “The job had some huge banks that they had to fill, and the Florida sand was coming through there so fast,” Watson says. “They needed to filter the water to get it out of there but not let the sand go through.”
Watson’s company served as a subcontractor on the job. He chose to use BSRF because the fence fabric has a woven center that seemed up to the task.
“The job site was a high-flow area that had the possibility of a lot of water coming through, and we needed the ability to filter it and not have the silt fence topple over,” Watson says. “It filters so much water when it comes through and has good purity when it comes out, compared to regular silt fence.” The product performed “above and beyond what was expected,” Watson notes.
As with some other newer products, though, the cost is higher than for traditional silt fence. He notes, “The material runs close to $1 a foot and they could put in regular silt fence for 55 cents a foot. They wondered why they should spend that much money.”
Watson points out that despite a higher upfront outlay, the return on investment comes in the long run. “It’s durable. You don’t have to replace it—it lasts so long, it’s unbelievable. You’re only going to do it once,” he says.
Watson also likes that he can buy it pre-assembled.
“Most people do that and trench it in,” he says. “I’ve always used the tommy Silt Fence Machine. At that job, we were able to put it in with the tommy machine, which did not disturb the ground underneath. We put the post in and were able to staple it up, so it was a much better job. I went with it because I could use the tommy.”
Now that he’s moved his company to Alabama, Watson is finding it challenging again to get the BSRF approved for use.
“They use wire silt fence here,” he says. “With the cost of steel and wire rising and the amount that it puts into a landfill, I think the BSRF is a superior product.”