Visualizing Industrial Organic Waste Located at Rib Lake, Wisconsin: A Geospatial Perspective Ground Penetrating Radar Test

Abstract

Rib Lake is a north-central Wisconsin village located next to a lake, which once was a holding pond for the Rib Lake Lumber Company. The company processed 1.47 billion board feet of lumber during its 70 years of operation. The sawmill employees dumped all their byproducts into the lake. The practice of dumping into Rib Lake created a thick layer of waste on the lake floor. Logs buried in the waste are of high value due to their rareness and old age. Through the extraction of the logs, the village would be able to sell them in order to fund a cleanup program. Data was gathered from probing into the frozen lake surface. A Microsoft Excel file was created containing coordinates, depth to waste, depth to bottom of the lake and depth to potential logs for each hole. Using ESRI tools, maps were created illustrating the depth to the lake bottom, location of logs and a three-dimensional rendition showing waste thickness. Using the probe information and data obtained using ground penetrating radar surveys, the data shows the thickness of waste is between 1.5 and 10 meters and the depth to the lake bottom is between 3 and 10 meters.