It’ll take another year before a report is complete, but the City of London is another step closer to decommissioning and partially removing the Springbank Dam.
On Tuesday, the civic works committee endorsed a recommendation from city staff to appoint Stantec Consulting Ltd. as consulting engineers to prepare the pre-design and detailed design of the decommissioning project.
The dam has been a sore point in London since it was damaged in a flood in 2000.
Repairs on the dam didn’t begin until 2006 and the issue came to a boiling point in 2008 when one of the steel gates became stuck in the open position during a test.
What followed was a lawsuit by the city against the engineers and designers and a counter-suit against the city. The case wasn’t put to rest until a settlement was agreed to in 2015 that awarded roughly $3.7 million to London, of which $3.4 million remains.
An environmental assessment was launched in March 2016 as part of the city’s One River Master Plan and by September 2017 city staff had laid out three options for the future of the dam: decommission it, leave it be or repair it.
Staff noted, however, that there had been an increase in the populations of “numerous important native species of fish, mussels and reptiles” since the failure of the dam.
Community consultation later found that 70 per cent of Londoners who participated in public meetings on the dam supported either decommissioning it or leaving it be and by January 2018, full council had approved a motion to begin the process of decommissioning the dam.
“Removing part of the dam, that was decided in 2019 with the council,” city councillor and civic works chair Elizabeth Peloza explained to Global News on Tuesday, before the meeting.
“Partial removal was pegged at $2.2 million to $4 million, whereas the full removal, including the concrete piers, was going to be $5.6 million and potentially up to $11 million. So council voted to go with the partial removal, balancing that with the environmental needs of letting the river flow and the financial needs of the city.”
If approved by council, Stantec will be tasked with finding a way forward to remove the components of the hydraulics, the electronics and the steel gates, and a plan for the ongoing maintenance of the concrete structure and the removal of the control room, Peloza says.
She adds that the report should be ready in 2022.
“It is another year’s wait to take this step forward, but it will come back with a detailed plan of what we’re doing and when.”
City staff list the cost of appointing Stantec at $328,318.28, “including contingency, excluding HST.” The appointment must still be approved by full council.
— with files from Global News’ Devon Peacock and Jaclyn Carbone.