The Beaver River drainage project is moving ahead with a looming deadline approaching.
The project will address an issue caused in the spring with water blowing out a settling pond.
The MD of Bonnyville council awarded the engineering services for the project to Wood Environmental and Infrastructure Solutions for $200,000 during their committee meeting on June 19.
Alberta Environment put an enforcement order on the municipality after a previous fix failed. The MD has until the fall to complete it.
”Our road goes straight north and south,” explained CAO Luc Mercier. “It has a lot of water from the entire area that’s carried with it in the ditches, and all those ditches are draining into the Beaver River in that area.”
In 2017, the MD was under a previous enforcement order that was removed when they met the requirements.In order to address erosion issues that sprang up as a result of the drainage, Mercier said they took the initiative to design and plan a strategy to “fix, repair, and mitigate future erosion over the bank leading down to the Beaver River.”
He continued, “It involved putting some water diversion stuff at the top, including rocks, to arm the bank at the top to slow the water down and stop the erosion. At the bottom, it included a settling pond right before the river.”
Once that project was completed, Alberta Environment removed the original enforcement order, but not for long.
”Unfortunately this spring, that work (done previously) had a breach there,” noted Reeve Greg Sawchuk. “This time the berm ended up blowing out, and you had uncontrolled water going into the Beaver River.”
The MD was required to inform Alberta Environment of the problem, which resulted in the second enforcement order being issued with a fall deadline.
”In any kind of construction or any project that any municipality has or a private company has, they need to report to Alberta Environment if there’s any breaches in the structure that’s installed or if there’s any issues with certain components of the project,” detailed Mercier. “In this case here, when we had a breach of the holding pond at the bottom of the spring, we let Alberta Environment know and they since said, ‘okay, we formally have to give you a order now to repair that’ even though we would have repaired it regardless of that because we have to have it fixed properly.”
According to Mercier, the drainage has been an issue for almost 60 years.
”There has been some different approvals for water direction, either through Alberta Transportation, Alberta Environment, or the MD back in the day, who approved the different water redirection,” he said.
A major factor for the ongoing problems throughout the years has been the unpredictability of the weather.
”When things like this happen, it’s Mother Nature and it’s our environment that... some things go sideways. We do the best that we can with the knowledge that we have through engineers and consultants to fix a problem, but it’s not a textbook fix,” Mercier explained.
Since the project wasn’t included in the 2019 budget, council had to approve the additional dollars in order for the project to move ahead.
Once the engineering is complete, council will be able to get an idea of how much construction will cost before sending it out to tender.
