Shirey Bay Rainey Brake will get upgrades from Arkansas Game and Fish

Little Rock, Arkansas – This coming week, the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission will be working to upgrade Shirey Bay Rainey Brake in Lawrence County.
As part of the diversion ditch repair, contractors and staff will be upgrading the Greentree reservoirs’ infrastructure.

“They’ve already mulched about two miles in the last two weeks,” Reid Phifer, assistant chief of the AGFC’s Operations Division over capital construction, said. “And they should move even faster on the remainder because the trees and brush in that section of the ditch are much smaller in diameter.”

To increase the system’s capacity, contractors, according to Phifer, will work at strategic locations along the ditch to address siltation problems that have accumulated over decades.

“It’s going to be 1,000 percent better for water management and getting that water through the WMA during the growing season and allow us to work with the ecosystem more efficiently during the winter migration,” Jason Jackson, state wetlands program coordinator for the AGFC, said. “We’re replacing all seven of those 36- to 48-inch pipe and precast box water control structures with 11- to 12-foot wide overshot gates. Two bridges also are being installed on existing crossings that cause a bottleneck where the flow slows down.”

AGFC Director Austin Booth stated that numerous partners, such as Senator John Boozman of Arkansas, who recently celebrated the approval of numerous appropriations measures to aid Arkansans and various infrastructure projects in The Natural State, were instrumental in making the project possible.

“Shirey Bay is one area where we can be proactive and accomplish a lot for public waterfowl habitat with some straightforward improvements to infrastructure,” Booth said. “On behalf of Arkansas’s sportsmen and sportswomen, I am grateful for Sen. Boozman’s strong and dependable support for conservation and faith in the waterfowl hunting and conservation community to improve habitat and provide public waterfowling access for future generations.”