Thank you Beverley, its a pleasure to be here.
I'll reiterate what Brent said, the Provo office could be talking about a number of
things that were working on, but I particularly like this one.
Can go to the next slide.
We'll talk about the AV Watkins Dam and Willard Bay Reservoir.
AV Watkins Dam is part of the Weber Basin Project.
Weber Basin Project is a multipurpose project built under the authority of the 1939 act it was constructed from
1958 to 1964.
We have a great partnership with the Weber Basin Water Conservancy District who are our partners in operating and maintaining
the Weber Basin Project,
their a forward thinking and a highly capable district and I'm pleased to have
Tage Flint who's the General Manager and Mark Anderson who's the Assistant General Manager
here today.
Also makes it a little more difficult for me because they know more about this than I do.
A V Watkins Dam is named after a Senator Arthur V. Watkins and a local folklore says that the,
the outline of the of the structure is a stylized profile of Senator Watkins,
Ok, I may have just made that up.
A V Watkins is interesting because it's a 14 mile long structure
that that goes out into the Great Salt Lake and actually inpounds water at the tail of the project, and inpounds that water before it enters
the Great Salt Lake and is fouled by the saline water there.
The reservoir Willard Bay is one of the most financially viable state parks
in the state of Utah's,
catalog and they operate that under an agreement with the Bureau of Reclamation.
I've often wondered if we would build A V Watkins Dam today.
The way we did this was, if you go to the next slide, we laid in a series of layers
of material, displacing the unconsolidated sediments in the in the lake bed
and we did this in a series of stages to allow for settlement.
So,
oddly enough stage three follows stage two,
Stage four was quite a bit later, we did the stage four construction in 1989 to 1990,
there was one station that over the years
had settled 18
vertical feet, which is saying something when you've got a 36 a vertical foot structure.
If we go forward in the history of little bit, lets go to the next slide,
in November is 2006
there was a landowner on the south side of the of the dam, noticed some increase in seepage
which indicated a
piping through the foundation
it was a,
a serious incident,
and as a result we've built a large berm on the upstream side of the
of the structure at this section, stopped the piping,
and then from 2008 to 2009
we undertook a safety of dams fix and on the south side and southwest sides we constructed a cement bentonite wall that
went from the crest down through the foundation to intercept seepage through the foundation of the structure.
Let's go to the next slide.
The thing that I want to focus on today is the toe drain and the crest raise and we probably should put those in the opposite order.
A V Watkins,
A V Watkins dam was built to be able to impound 227,000 acre feet
but it had actually been planned to be a larger structure able to impound 250,000 acre feet,
and we have within our water rights the ability to store an additional 20,000 acre feet at A V Watkins.
The Weber Basin Water Conservancy District being the forward thinking entity that they are
and facing the same, the same situations that we all do, increasing population,
drought conditions, climate change
felt that it was an opportune time to look at a raise of the crest of the dam.
They had proposed a raise of five vertical feet
that would have increased the capacity of the the structure by 50,000 acre feet
approximately.
But that five foot raise
creates some engineering problems and other issues,
and so we settled upon a two foot raise of the elevation of the structure, that will increase the capacity by 20,000 acre feet
thats within the water rights that we have.
It also allows us to
characterize this as firming up of the project water supply
giving us the opportunity to precede under our operation maintenance authority, that gives us a quite a bit of flexibility
in terms of construction.
As part of the two-foot raise that is being planned we also have, are in the process of constructing a toe drain
that toe drain will allow for filtration and monitoring of seepage on the north side of the of the structure
and is an important improvement.
These, we anticipate that in the spring 2015
will begin the two-foot raise on the structure
and that will be conducted by the Weber Basin Water Conservancy District under their operation maintenance authority.
The thing I like about this project is that it's
an opportunity for us, Reclamation
to partner with a good and capable water conservancy district
to prepare for the future which is what our job is.
Mark and Tage, what did I miss?
Thank you.
I'll turn the time over to Reed Murray,
he's the Director of the
Central Utah Project Completion Act office,
an office where I worked for for six years,
and a good guy.