Low Mon River water levels spark complaints amid demolition project

Area residents have posted photos on social media of their boats getting stuck in the mud.

Chuck Mazzarese posted this photo on Facebook July 25 showing the river level at the Carousel Marina in Bunola. Via Facebook

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Pittsburgh District has been facing criticism as many residents and boaters along the Monongahela River have been seeing more shoreline exposure since the July 10 dam breach of the Monongahela River Locks and Dam 3 near Elizabeth.

Michel Sauret, public affairs specialist with the Army Corps Pittsburgh District, said they have held multiple public information sessions and outreach efforts to let marinas and boaters know that the water would drop two to three feet to equalize.

“Boaters are upset because they think we have dropped more than two feet in water levels. Very few are saying we didn’t warn them, but that’s not the criticism,” Sauret said. “Most of the criticism is that we dropped more than we promised, and based on our readings and based on our gauges, that’s not true, and because obviously the water goes up and down and fluctuates. But, as you fluctuate it, it’s about two, two and a half, three feet at the most — not four or five or six feet.

“The funny thing is yesterday I had a conversation with two men, one upstream and one downstream. The man upstream insisted they lost more than two feet, and the guy downstream said we raised it more than we promised.

“I don’t know how that can be true that we raised it and lowered it more than we promised. I think some people will feel like we’re gaslighting them and telling them lies, like we’re denying what they’re seeing.”

The Lower Monongahela River Project includes work at navigation facilities near Braddock, Elizabeth and Charleroi. Locks and Dam 3 has been in continuous operation since 1907 to provide lockages for industry vessels and recreational boaters, leading up to its demolition because it no longer is necessary to have a lock at that location.

The first of a series of controlled explosions to remove the fixed crest of the 16-foot-deep, 700-foot-wide dam occurred on July 10 as scheduled, but it was pushed back from the original demolition time of early afternoon until later in the evening that day due to strong winds that led to choppy water.

Upon completion of the dam removal, it will create a continuous pool of riverway stretching 30 miles from Charleroi to Braddock.

“We’re pretty much on track where we said we were going to be with the way the elevations have changed since we had the original blasts,” said Steve Fritz, the Mega Project program manager. “So it’s pretty much where we expected. We ex- pected a two-foot drop in the pool elevation, and that’s what we’re seeing in the pool today. It’s a little bit less than two feet if you look at it today.”

Fritz also said the river has fluctuated between two and three feet since July 10, and he’s concerned about the public’s complaints of the river being lower than they said.

“What we are seeing is a two-foot drop in river elevation,” Fritz said. “They might be comparing that to two additional feet in shoreline exposure, but as the river level drops depending on where you are along the river, you might see 10 or 15 feet of more horizontal shoreline, but it’s still a 2-foot drop in the river. So a lot of it’s perception. I’m certainly concerned about the perception the general public has about where the river levels are at.”

Boaters unhappy

Valley resident Chuck Mazzarese and many others have taken to social media to post pictures of their boats stuck in river mud. Mazzarese said there have been issues at Carousel Marina in Bunola along with many others like it.

“Those are all my buddies up there at Carousel and we all are really unhappy with what’s going on,” Mazzarese said. “My boat’s out on the water right now due to the boat ingesting mud. I posted all the photos from (Carousel) mainly because I’m there all the time and now I can’t take my boat there because of the levels. I have plenty of opinions on it.”

Elizabeth Forward School Board President Thomas Sharkey, an Elizabeth resident, said he has been boating in the Carousel Marina pool since he was 16. He is also concerned about the river levels and feels the Army Corps doesn’t care about recreation or business along the river.

“I don’t feel like they’ve communicated to those people like when I talk to the guy that owns our marina, he’s like, ‘I have no idea what’s going to happen.’ So now you have a guy. His place is almost unusable now, and the Army Corps is nowhere to be found,” Sharkey said. “I’ve been up and down the river and all the other pools are great. I feel like the numbers that they estimated, it’s way lower. It has to be. I read three feet. To me, it seems like it’s six feet like there’s so much shoreline exposed now it’s crazy.

“I just feel like they spent all this money, but where’s the communication with these folks? If you would go down and talk to the guy from the Carousel at that marina, it’s been in his family his whole life. This is going to have a bigger impact on many from a recreational standpoint than they have said.”

According to Sauret and Fritz, there is money set aside to help public marinas and other public locations, but it’s not the Army Corps’ engineers doing the work, which is case by case. Regulators, real estate specialists and GIS are all working together to assist each of those public places depending on where their needs may be.

A huge community outreach endeavor has taken place over the last few years for the entire project, Fritz said. It started with talking with the navigation community, the Pittsburgh Safe Boating Council, local residential communities and more.

The Army Corps also has distributed fliers, hosted two public information sessions, had navigation notices, talked to local legislators and people on the street as well as had other forums to publicize the river changes, according to Fritz.

“There’s a handful of marinas upstream from Lock and Dam No. 3 that have expressed their concerns because they believe that the water levels have dropped more than what was anticipated,” Fritz said. “We reached out to them individually, and we’re planning on meeting with them in the next one to two weeks to start to get them on the process to get their facilities looked at to see what they can do to be compatible with these new navigation levels and river elevations.”

Fritz said while the Army Corps is able to help public marinas as well as eight different communities and 49 individual facilities, it can’t help the private ones level out their waters.

“We don’t have any federal authorities to provide money to them to adjust their facilities,” Fritz said. “We have federal money to address publicly owned facilities like the Riverfront Park in Elizabeth. We’re going to be elevating the depth of that because we have the authority to. We can’t do that for the commercial industry, we can’t do that for privately owned marinas.

“I think the big takeaway is we’re meeting with these concerned marinas so we can get them back on track to make sure the facilities are as functional as possible.”

The day after the first explosion, the lock portion of the river reopened for commercial navigation, but it remained closed to recreational traffic and boaters.

The dam’s removal work will continue through December, but a 100-foot-wide section of the dam will be turned into a navigation channel through the dam, which is estimated to be finished around Aug. 28. The rest of the dam’s demolition will continue until December.

The original river 100-footwide river channel, which isn’t the whole dam, was supposed to be done by December as well, but on July 15, the Monongahela River Locks and Dam 3 staff discovered an issue with the water level in the primary lock chamber, leading to the implementation of a seven-foot draft restriction and expediting a navigation channel, which hasn’t caused a drop in river elevation.

“We planned to have the whole dam removed by December of 2024, but we’ve prioritized the removal of a section of the dam so that we could get commercial navigation through here sooner than December,” Fritz said. “The commercial navigation industry, when they are pushing boats through the chamber here, there’s not enough draft over top of one of the structural components of the lock for them to get a full nine-foot depth barge through the chamber.

“So out of the abundance of caution, we’ve reduced the navigation channels through our lock chamber to about seven feet until we are able to open up that new navigation channel,” Fritz added. “And when that new navigation channel is opened up, it’s expected to be by the end of August, they’ll be able to navigate through there — with much larger tows that were able to get through the existing chamber even as it is today.”

Until the Corps removes the entire dam and finishes the navigation channel, all traffic must pass through the landside lock.

The navigation industry continues to utilize the lock chamber within this navigational restriction to preserve navigation and avoid the possibility of damaging vessels or the lock chamber itself.

Demolition is expected to continue each week, with 13 more controlled explosions required to take down the rest of the dam in 50-foot sections. Contractors then will use excavators on barges to remove the rubble from the river.

After the dam is removed and the riverway is cleared, waterway users can navigate through the area without using the lock chambers.

Fritz added that the lack of rainfall in the area isn’t contributing to the lower river levels, which are checked every day by facilities.

Drought declared

On July 18, the National Weather Service in Pittsburgh announced a drought information statement for eastern Ohio, northern West Virginia and southwestern Pennsylvania.

According to the NWS in Pittsburgh, conditions are due to the lack of precipitation and high temperatures.

Rain has averaged around 1 to 3 inches in past months, with those amounts only reaching 20-50% of precipitation typically expected during that time.

Temperatures also well above normal have also contributed to the drought conditions across the Mon Valley and the surrounding region, and it gets worse progressing further south into far southwestern Pennsylvania and northern West Virginia.

Matt Brudy, an NWS Pittsburgh meteorologist, said the U.S. Drought Monitor is updated each Thursday to show the location and intensity of drought across the country, which uses a five-category system, from Abnormally Dry (D0) conditions to Exceptional Drought (D4) and can be checked at https://www. drought.gov/data-maps-tools/ us-drought-monitor.

Southwestern Pennsylvania was at D1 Thursday, with Brudy saying that while a lot of the area is in a drought status, the widespread rain that occurred Friday should help and the drought should not affect river levels.

“Yeah, not too much of an effect. The rivers have been generally holding their normal levels,” Brudy said. “We’re not really forecasting much of a rise or a fall event for the past 48 hours or recently on the river, which is generally pretty steady. They’ve been generally holding steady within their normal poles.

“I mean, you know, a lot of them within the Pittsburgh area are controlled by the locks and dams. So you’re not going to see big fluctuations in them, especially ones around the locks and dams, unless you get a whole lot of rainfall.”

By around the end of November or the early part of December, there is going to be another one-foot vertical drop in the river elevation, according to Fritz.

“We’re holding that up a little bit higher to facilitate the construction here and to keep navigation moving through here,” Fritz said. “What happens at that point is from here on until the next 50, 100 years, that’s going to be the level of the river. Again, it’s perception. The river level today is at a certain level. So if you are looking at the river level today and say it’s going to drop a foot, tomorrow the river level is going to be different.”

Daily river levels can be found at https://water.noaa. gov as well as other river level tracking apps.

The Pittsburgh District will then move onto the next phase of removing the lock walls in 2025, with work expected to last until 2027.

Once complete, the project is expected to bring an economic benefit of $200 million annually, including cost time savings in transporting commodities through the region using inland navigation and reduced maintenance costs.

“It’s significant what we have invested in this community,” Fritz said. “This is important. Perception is one thing, facts are something else. I just want to make sure that people understand that we told them what was happening and this is what’s happening.”