Cleaning and maintaining irrigation canals, laterals, and ditches is a vital part of the irrigation water delivery process. Throughout the irrigation delivery season, vegetation growth within project waterways can drastically limit the capacity and ability to get the desired amount of water through those systems. Often times, mechanical cleaning of these affected waterways must be completed during the irrigation season to maintain adequate flows.
Bring in the excavator! These large machines make quick work out of removing unwanted vegetation from waterways. However, there has always been one little problem… Excavator buckets are typically solid to hold material in. These work great in the dirt, but are not particularly effective when you are trying to skim vegetation out of a canal as they like to fill up with water and not much else. To combat this problem, the District has started designing and fabricating our own “skeleton buckets” for our excavators. These buckets consist of ribs instead of a solid back allowing water to freely flow through them while collecting vegetation from the waterway. Our in-house welder/fabricator has built a multitude of these buckets in varying sizes. So far, we have seen great results with these for vegetation removal during the irrigation season.
