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Following wall's path
The toe of what will eventually be a 10-foot-high wall is being placed at the water's edge of National Gypsum's huge cement kiln dust pile on the shore of Thunder Bay.
The cost of the wall will be $2.2 million.
David Bassett, whose firm is handling the company's public relations, said the project is on schedule and may be completed before the projected Dec. 1 deadline.
Rocking in the waves aboard Ed Retherford's charter fishing boat about 40 feet from shore, Bassett pointed at yellow booms floating along the 1,850-foot length of the growing wall.
"That yellow floatation holds up the silt curtains, or turbidity curtains. ..., Bassett said. "The purpose of that is to keep anything that might flow down from the land - anything stirred up in the construction process - from getting into the lake."
Work is under way on infrastructure needed to build the wall.
"We've had to build our own road system, and we had to be sure what the trucks travel on is sturdy enough to hold their weight," he said.
Bassett pointed to a vehicle spraying the developing roadway with water to keep down dust during construction.
"We have that going constantly throughout the construction site to keep the dust down. You have to be careful. If you get too much water on the (cement kiln dust), it turns into like a filmy, pasty liquid like if you mixed water with talcum powder," he said.
If too much water is added and mud is created, it is not as easy for the heavy equipment to move.
The high cliffs of cement kiln dust will be bulldozed away from the water into a gentle slope. The seawall will be at the base of the slope. It will be about two-thirds as high as the city's harbor breakwall.
"I think the city breakwall is about 12 feet high and ours is about 8 or 9 feet above the current water level," Bassett said.
However, the armor stone to be placed on the seawall will be larger than the stone used on the city's breakwall. Each stone will weigh between three tons and six and a half tons. The Lafarge Corp. is providing the funding for the stone, which will come from the Glawe Inc. quarry on Long Lake Avenue. Glawe is performing the construction.
Once the roadwork is completed in the next couple of weeks, the slope work will begin.
"It'll be a very gradual slope, and we'll put topsoil and grass on top of that to eliminate any erosion," he said.
He estimated the slope will be about a 20- to 30-degree angle about 100 feet inland from the shoreline. The creation of the slope will take a couple of weeks.
"Then they'll actually start putting the big armor stone on top to build the revetment (seawall). The revetment itself will go back from the yellow floatation devices about 45 feet, so the yellow floatation devices mark the toe of the revetment," he said.
Bassett compared the building of this seawall to painting a room of a home, saying the preparation often takes as long or longer than the actual painting.
"Building the infrastructure has taken a lot of time, but it has taken as much time as we anticipated it would. So, once we get all the roads in, everything else will go very smoothly," he said.
A staging area for the stone used in this project is located close to Ford Avenue.
"If the weather holds, we can beat the Dec. 1 deadline," Bassett said.
The type of weather that would cause delays would be heavy rain or snow because of what it does to the consistency of the cement kiln dust, he said.
Another 3,000 feet of the pile that is not eroding as badly as the bluff
portion will be addressed in a second phase of work in the coming year.
Because of the numerous requests from our online readers, The Alpena News has added the following page: OBITUARIES |
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