GASTON -- Repairing a 400-foot section of Ind. 28 that is slowly sinking into a bog is expected to cost more than half a million dollars.

This news will come as no surprise to many residents of the Gaston area, which was once home to two swamps that were of nature-preseve quality before being mined.

During a recent meeting with local government representatives, Indiana Department of Transportation officials reported that a section of the highway east of Delaware County Road 600-W, near Wes-Del Middle and High schools, is "basically sinking away."

It will cost an estimated $543,253 to excavate a deposit of dead plant material known as peat underneath the road and reconstruct it. Construction is tentatively scheduled for 2014, after completion of engineering and right of way acquisition.

An INDOT official said the peat deposit could be 30 feet deep.

The site is where a woods runs along the south side of the highway and goes over to the north side.

The property is not far from the 30-acre McColm Bog, which ecologist Alton Lindsey strongly recommended saving as a state nature preserve in his 1969 book The Natural Areas in Indiana and Their Preservation.

Less than 3 miles south of Gaston, McColm Bog was more of a swamp than a bog, but it contained sphagnum moss in limited parts of the wetland, Lindsey reported.

The major use of peat, of which McColm Bog contained a deep substrate, is as a soil amendment (sold as peat moss or sphagnum peat when dried).

Bogs are important for biodiversity. Lindsey found unusual species of water buttercup and royal fern when he visited the bog. Other scientists documented a rare species of mosquito there.

Lindsey recommended that the 200-plus-acre Old Prairie Swamp, three miles north of Gaston, be saved as a local nature preserve.

He described that site as a "peaty swamp occupying an extensive ice-block depression" covered by a dense, floating layer of liverwort on the open, wet mucky spots. It was home to a very rare species of a large, hard- biting mosquito. In the middle of the 20th century, rattlesnakes were seen on a road that had been flooded by the swamp.

Neither Old Prairie Swamp nor McColm Bog were preserved.