Probing work almost ready at Rivers dam

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This article was published 10/07/2020 (2123 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Crews from Manitoba Infrastructure were hard at work on the Rivers dam on Friday preparing for the tests that will determine how well the structure has held up under stress it wasn’t built to handle.

On either side of the Little Saskatchewan River at the bottom of the dam’s spillway, workers were stacking large rocks to create a pad from which a probing tool can be used.

The tool is long enough to reach about half the width of the dam. It will be deployed on one side, and then when it’s reached its end, the tool will be carted around to the other side of the river to inspect the second half of the structure.

Infrastructure Minister Ron Schuler, who toured flood-hit parts of Westman on Friday, said they hope to get a picture of the dam’s condition by next week.

“We’ll be doing testing all weekend long,” he said. “That will give us a sense of if there’s been any significant erosion.”

Other tests were being done along the earth on either side of the dam to test if any water was seeping through the earth and gravel there. When the Sun visited with Schuler at the dam, the first two tests done had not detected any seepage.

The water level in Lake Wahtopanah and the flow along the spillway continues to decline, but the massive amounts of water spilling out of the lake is still a dramatic sight.

At the bottom of the spillway, the water is white, almost milky in colour. As it flows down the river, the colour gets browner, almost resembling tea or coffee with milk in it. Further along from that, the water takes on a more familiar shade but is topped with a thick white froth.

Rivers was Schuler’s second stop of the day, visiting Lake Wahtopanah with the mayor of Riverdale Municipality, Todd Gill. Schuler said approximately 20 workers were on the scene at the time.

On Thursday, a Facebook post on the municipality’s Facebook page said that the probing work on the dam would be slightly delayed due to some concerns raised by Manitoba Workplace Safety and Health.

However, Gill said Friday those concerns had been alleviated with the creation of a safe work plan that will involve municipal emergency personnel being on hand to supervise.

“It hasn’t slowed anything up,” Gill said. “They’ve got the equipment here, and they are just preparing the pads down there and they should be ready to perform the task in the next day or two.”

Schuler said potential risks from working on the dam come from the amount of water still flowing through the dam as well as the fact that there may be obstacles under the water that aren’t currently visible due to the froth and murkiness.

On Wednesday this week, some of the evacuees from Riverdale Municipality were allowed to return home as the latest inundation maps provided by the province predict they won’t be in danger should the dam end up bursting.

A release sent out by the province on Wednesday said 53 people remained evacuated from Riverdale and 17 remain evacuated from the RM of Whitehead. Evacuees from the Town of Neepawa and the RM of Cornwallis have all been allowed to return.

“We hope as the water recedes that we can continue to do that,” Gill said. “Ultimately, we need to be confident that the dam is not at risk before we permit everybody back.”

Asked if there were any lessons learned from the flooding, Gill said the municipality will be revising its emergency plan to take into consideration some of the effects of the recent storms.

“A fracture at the dam was never really considered,” he said. “We’re learning on the fly, we’re doing the best we can and I think so far with the communication and collaboration with the province, we’ve done quite well.”

Earlier Friday, Schuler visited Neepawa where the dam at Park Lake had failed. His third and final stop was Minnedosa, where the dam at Lake Minnedosa has also held under the strain put on it by floodwaters.

The minister told the Sun on Thursday that much of the other cleanup and repair work, as well as damage assessment to Westman infrastructure, would take place once Rivers dam has been confirmed to be in good shape.

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