By BILL MARDIS, Editor Emeritus
A Columbia (Ky.) firm is building a new plant to supply concrete for the barrier wall to be inserted into leak-plagued Wolf Creek Dam.
A spokesman at Pyles Concrete Inc. confirmed that his company is building the plant. The new facility is located across U.S. 127 from the entrance to Lake Cumberland State Park about 3 miles north of the dam.
Larry Craig, power plant manager at Wolf Creek Dam, said work on the concrete plant has been going out for about six weeks. The plant should be ready to supply concrete for widening the work platform on the upstream side of the dam. This project will be done very soon by Weddle Enterprises of Somerset.
Meanwhile, the lake is nearly back to its target of 680 feet above sea level after being flushed by heavy rains to about eight feet above an acceptable range. All six generators in the dam operated for several weeks to get the lake to where the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has tried to keep it for the past two years.
The lake at 6 a.m. Monday was 680.41 feet above sea level and falling slowly. Only one generator was operating, releasing 3,420 cubic feet of water per second into the Cumberland River below the dam.
Another storm system was approaching the area Monday and weather forecasters are predicting up to 3 inches of rain in the Cumberland River Basin. Runoff from rainfall in this amount could flush rivers and streams and trigger another rise in the lake.
Meanwhile, work at Wolf Creek Dam goes on. Treviicos-Soletanche JV, the joint French-Italian general contractor for the barrier wall project, is installing piezometers (pressure-reading instruments) atop the dam and Boart Longyear, another contractor, is installing piezometers on the downstream side of the dam. Craig said the northbound lane of U.S. 127 atop the dam is blocked for more than 500 feet while instrumentation is being put in place.
A $341.4 million contract was awarded last summer to Treviicos Soletanche JV to place a second concrete diaphragm in Wolf Creek Dam to stop uncontrolled seepage that has plagued the dam since Lake Cumberland was impounded.
The concrete barrier wall is the primary element of the Wolf Creek Dam Seepage Rehabilitation Project. The wall will be a combination of secant piles and rectangular panels installed through the earthen embankment to a depth of about 275 feet.
Extending the wall deep into the limestone formations beneath the dam will effectively cut off seepage through the structure. The wall will extend eastward along the upstream embankment from the concrete section to the right abutment, a length of about 4,200 feet.
Rehabilitation of the dam will be basically complete when the barrier wall is inserted. The four-year contract, if completed on time, would put the finish date in 2012, some two years earlier than had been projected.
