If you told most people that a federal agency was using sand extracted from the Mississippi River to create new islands, the question that would follow is, "why?" The reason, it turns out, is less mysterious, and the project itself is located in an area not often traveled by the average American. As reported by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in a news release, contractors began work constructing six new islands within Pigs Eye Lake, a relatively obscure backwater of the Mississippi River located in the southeast corner of St. Paul, Minnesota, in June of 2022.
Using approximately 400,000 cubic yards of sand extracted from the Mississippi River during its regular dredging operations and dumped temporarily on Pine Bend Island, contractors laid the base for the six new islands, which will eventually cover more than 40 acres and provide habitat for the local ecosystem within the 600-plus acres of the Pigs Eye Lake. It is, in short, a federal project, literally creating something from nothing, and raising the question of exactly what problem it was trying to solve.
