By LIAM BELAN
[email protected]
Around 100 Mon Valley residents made their way to Elizabeth Borough Fire Hall Tuesday night for a presentation from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers detailing the progress of the Lower Monongahela River Project.
District Commander Nicholas Melin and Project Manager Steve Fritz presented information on the work being done on Locks and Dams 2, 3 and 4 in the Mon River at Braddock, Elizabeth and North Charleroi, respectively. They also fielded questions from the public and were joined by several partners that had specific expertise for the public to take advantage of.
That trio of locks and dams are the three oldest operating facilities on the Mon River and see the highest volume of commercial traffic in the entire system. The pools created by those systems provide industrial and municipal water that are used for many things, including as a habitat for sea animals and recreational boating.
Being so old, work has been happening for a long time to update the infrastructure for a myriad of reasons.
“When these facilities were built, they were built for a 50-year life,” Fritz said. “All (of these) but (North) Charleroi are over 100-years old. We’ve limped these things along for a long time.”
“The federal government has invested over $1 billion in updating the locks and dams along this portion of the river, and that’s a statement of how important this region is to the nation commercially, industrially and for the local community recreationally,” Melin said.”
For these reasons, changes to the system are almost finished, which were detailed by Melin and Fritz.
Removal of the Elizabeth Lock and Dam is scheduled from July to December 2024. The project’s new modifications, which were approved in 1992 and have seen work since about 1995, is coming to a close soon.
To describe why the Elizabeth portion was being removed, Fritz detailed a 2006 inspection of Lock and Dam 3 where he could reach his hand and feel no concrete or rock. In the “2006 to 2007 time frame,” there was a failure of the dam apron at Lock and Dam 3, which was another reason for the condition-driven project.
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