The city is in the process of exploring land acquisitions for the Dry Creek flood protection plans, city engineer Guy Cicon said.
According to the Dry Creek Flood Mitigation Study commissioned by the city in 2013, the option chosen by the city requires the acquisition of the Jade Restaurant property in order to remove the Restaurant bridge located there. The Bute Street Rail Bridge—just behind Third Avenue—would also have to be removed.
While details of the land acquisitions will remain in-camera until a decision is reached, Cicon said that the city hopes that the land acquisitions will be finished this spring so that a request for proposal can be proceed as scheduled in April and a contract awarded in May, with the work to be completed during summer 2015.
Cicon told city council at their Jan. 26 meeting that Dry Creek improvements this summer, city engineer Guy Cicon told city council at their Jan. 26 meeting.
“The general premise of improving the storm water drainage in this stream is to improve the capacity of the channel,” Cicon said.
The project will include 550 metres of channel improvements downstream of 3rd Avenue, a new box culvert under Third Avenue, 100 metres of channel improvements between Third and Fourth Avenue, bridge improvements under Fourth Avenue and 40 metres of channel improvements upstream of Fourth Avenue.
Channel improvements will include widening the channel, adding fish-friendly slope enhancements and a sediment trap upstream of Fourth Avenue.
The project will be funded one-third by the city and two-thirds by federal and provincial grants.
Part of the issue is that the channel behind the Dairy Queen has very dense bush and over the years the area has accumulated a significant amount of sediment and debris. Cicon said that if the base of that channel is widened the problem could be alleviated.
The improved creek will have a gravel and boulder bottom to ensure suitable fish habitats with some rip-rap along the sides to curtail erosion, Cicon’s report stated.
Coun. Jack McLeman questioned whether or not the Dry Creek channel improvements would help with both the flooding at the bottom of the Third Avenue hill and the flooding closer to the Third Avenue and Bute intersection.
“The situation we had last time didn’t seem to be [Dry] Creek overflowing, it seemed to be the manhole pumping up... I just want to make sure we’re doing the right thing,” McLeman said.
Cicon told council that the flooding by Third and Bute was being investigated.
“We’re waiting for the water to go down a little bit and we’ll send our camera into those particular pipes and model that one out to see if there’s anything unique with that one,” he said adding that while he didn’t want to presume what may or may not be there, he had “some solutions that aren’t enormous fixes for that particular situation down there.”
Cicon admitted that the improvements were not a fool proof fix.
“The downstream impacts of a driving tide and the storm surge is hard to fight against” but that their “modeling does show that there’ll be significant improvement.”
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