Posted on September 15, 2020
The potential dredging of Thunder Bay’s Boulevard Lake will go before city council on Monday, but the project itself would be a long-term one, city administration said Thursday.
The idea of dredging the lake has been floated before, with a study being done in 2010.
Monday, it will go before council as part of a report on cleaning up Boulevard while the lake is drained to allow for work on the dam there. Council is not scheduled to vote Monday on whether or not to go ahead with dredging the lake.
City director of engineering and operations Kayla Dixon said even if council does eventually decide to go ahead with the dredging, the project would be a long-term one, requiring additional study and “quite a few” environmental approvals.
“This would not be done in the short-term,” Dixon said. “If council directs us to, we would have to complete another study, determine really what … costs are associated with that, as well as go through likely a full environmental assessment requiring public consultation.”
Boulevard Lake is currently drained to facilitate work on the dam. That work is scheduled for completion by the end of 2021, although Dixon said the project is ahead of schedule.
Dredging need to meet dragon boat standards
However, she said even if council directed the city to go ahead with the dredging project immediately, the dredging wouldn’t be completed while the dam work is ongoing.
Dredging the lake would be required if the city’s dragon boat festival were ever to return to Boulevard, Dixon said.
“It’s a man-made lake, so it’s not a deep lake,” Dixon said. “The river channel … is narrow.”
“The river channel would be widened, to allow a minimum of four boats to race side-by-side.”
In addition, watermains cross under the surface of the lake, and those would also need to be moved to allow the lake to meet International Dragon Boat Federation course-length standards, Dixon said.
“It’s not something that we’ve done specific cost studies around,” she said of the project. “But what we would recommend at this point would be that … when [the watermains] need to be removed, we would look at some sort of trenchless repair. So we would use the existing mains, and reline them, or possibly pull a new pipe through those.”
“We would look to renew them in place, and that generally would be more cost-effective than actually digging them up and moving them.”
Source: cbc.ca
