De Grote Moere is still developing after twenty years: what kind of puddle is this?

Even though sand extraction stopped twenty years ago, there is still a lot to do around the Grote Moere. Local residents from Grolloo showed that illegal soil has been dumped in the former sand extraction lake for more than ten years. The licensing appears to be not in order and the work has been halted. But what kind of pee is this anyway?

The Grote Moere was once a place where sand was extracted. The extraction of sand created a pool of up to fifteen meters deep in some places. When the work was stopped in the late 1990s, various parties considered a new use for the lake.

Staatsbosbeheer chose to fill in the lake and turn it into a nature reserve. But until that work started, the municipality of Aa en Hunze established a tolerance zone for nude recreationists in 2005. In about ten years, De Moere grew unwillingly into a well-known place for sex tourism.

Hikers in the area were regularly confronted with people having sex with each other. Stricter controls and fines were intended to make the area less attractive as a (gay) meeting place. Ultimately, nude sunbathing was banned to keep out sex tourists.

The redevelopment of the area has been going on for about twenty years now and in 2013 a start was made on filling in the lake. The area had to become a park-like landscape with shallower water. Sex tourism disappeared.

Once started, the filling work was stopped after a few months due to massive fish deaths in the lake. The cause turned out to be the dumping of tare soil, which caused a lack of oxygen. Tare soil is waste soil from crops after harvest, which contains plant remains.

Initially, the work at the Moere was to be completed in 2026, and 35,000 trucks would drive back and forth for ten years to fill the lake with approximately 1.2 million cubic meters of sand and complete the nature reserve. That period appears to be too short, Staatsbosbeheer indicates that it will need at least another five to ten years to complete the Grolloo Nature Park.

This work has now come to a standstill again, now that the De Grote Moere working group has shown that no permit has been granted by the municipality of Aa en Hunze to Staatsbosbeheer for this attenuation. It is still unclear how long the work will be halted.

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