70 Tons Of Dirt Removed After Sacramento Gold Rush Days Without Water Waste In Drought

SACRAMENTO (CBS13) — It's a California drought test in Old Sacramento—how to clean up 70 tons of dirt without wasting any water.

The cleanup after Sacramento Gold Rush Days may be the most scrutinized cleaning of any single street in the city. Planners tasked an expert cleaning team with removing tons of dirt from the street with zero water waste.

The work started hours after the festival ended, as Don Poole with Thunder Mountain Enterprises led the job.

"We've got to be carefully not to tear up and scratch the road," he said.

The city canceled the family favorite event last year to avoid a drought public-relations nightmare—crews would spray the streets with 100,000 gallons of water to clear 200 tons of dirt as they'd done in years past.

But with California three years in a drought at the time, that option wasn't available. So the city got creative.

"We want to save water," said Sidney Scheideman with the city's convention and visitors bureau. "We're in a drought it's important, to us and so we worked really hard to come up with this plan."

The cleanup plan was a year in the making. It started with scaling back the amount of dirt used from 200 tons to just 70 tons. Leaving out the dirt wasn't an option, since it creates an aesthetic of the mid-19th century.