Bill Bucher gets some time off from his job this week -- to go to Texas and talk about his job. Bucher, a senior hydrologist and engineer with Maxim Technologies, recently authored, with two other engineers, a report on the environmental engineering firm's work on rechanneling and reclaiming Silverbow Creek as it flows out of Butte toward the Clark Fork.

The report, submitted to the International Erosion Control Association, earned the group's Most Distinguished Technical Paper Award for Environmental Excellence, and Bucher and his colleagues will attend the association's annual meeting this week in Dallas to present their work.

"This is the largest single project I've undertaken in my career and in some ways what I've been working toward for 20 years," Bucher said. "It's definitely a high point for me."

Maxim has been working on the Silverbow Creek project since 1984, Bucher said, and construction has been under way for six years.

The project involves creating a whole new creek bed from scratch, and re-routing the water from its present course. Essentially, the entire flood plain, several hundred feet wide, was stripped of its contaminated soil and refilled with clean backfill. Then, a new creek bed was dug.

So far, seven of 26 miles of the creek have been rebuilt. That work has involved the removal of 1.2 million cubic yards of contaminated soil and the importation of 570,000 cubic yards of clean soil. (To put those volumes in perspective, a million cubic yards would fill a pro football stadium to the top.)

"The question was, how can we modify it so it's not only a clean stream, but functioning as a natural waterway?" Bucher said. "We're trying to restore a stream with logs and rocks that can meander through the flood plain rather than just be a ditch."

In addition to creating fish and plant habitat by engineering the new waterway, Bucher said wetlands are being developed throughout the flood plain as well.

The meanders are engineered so the creek will erode the stream bed and cultivate plant life in as natural a fashion as possible, allowing the fish and wildlife long gone from contaminated Silverbow Creek to return and flourish.

"We are using technologies that have been used on streams in Montana and elsewhere, but never on this scale and never with this flexibility," Bucher said.

Bucher and his co-authors, Larry Cawlfield of Maxim's Helena office and Gary Wolff from a firm in Fort Collins, Colo., will make a 30-minute presentation of their work in Dallas.

"I think it's a really important and large-scale project that's unique in the United States in terms of its scope," Bucher said. "We can have such a large impact on the improvement of the environment. To be able to bring this to a conference and present it, it does feel good."

Bucher said that for a project that's been on the drawing board for more than a decade and under construction for several years, it's gratifying to see it come to fruition.

"There's tremendous satisfaction that all the hard work of lining up the project in the early days is now on the ground and doing what we thought it would do," he said. "Improving the environment motivates us in our work, and we like to see a project come along where we can do the right thing for the environment and for Montana."

John Harrington can be reached at 447-4080 or john.harrington@helenair.com.