To the Editor,
Re: City looks at Colliery options, Aug. 14.
Decisions are rushed for the Colliery Dams once again. No time has been given to consider the implications of this decision.
Council’s motion has given the illusion of including innovative solutions, but in actual fact has only added multiple layers of bureaucracy, convolutes the goal and will add millions of dollars to the final solution with no inherent gain.
Spending $200,000-$400,000 to give the illusion of inclusion is madness. That money would be far better spent looking at how the dams would react in a flood event. Doing the study could show little or nothing is required.
The current overtopping proposal (up to three metres of concrete over the whole of the downside berm) is expensive, intrusive, and not necessary. The Dam Safety Branch does not require the dams to be remediated to this standard, just that they do not fail in a manner that causes loss of life or property.
The motion is a consultants’ dream, but has limited value to the city and citizens. Once again it will be more money wasted.
Jeff SolomonColliery Dam Park Preservation Society
To the Editor,
Re: City looks at Colliery options, Aug. 14.
We have come full circle in the almost two years the Colliery Dams Park issue has been before us; first, removal of the Dams proposed based on supposition and assumptions made from incomplete reports; now, two overtopping solutions based again simply on conjecture.
At a cost of $2 million, we know two things; one, the dams will not fail in an earthquake; two, rather than the original 100-150 deaths presented in a Dam failure, no one will die.
The technical committee was formed in 2013 to revisit the original scenarios with actual scientific data. When scientifically determined the dams would not fail in an earthquake, the focus turned to a mythical inundation event.
Colliery Dam Park Preservation Society was right taking a hiatus from the technical committee when an alternative overtopping measure, a $5 million savings, was refused to be considered by city staff.
Time to reconvene the technical committee and do an erosion modelling study; the likely outcome would be that we actually have to do nothing to the dams.
Gordon W. FullerNanaimo