As many people saw in the Journal World, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has required Bowersock to keep its millpond at damtop.  We can go into this at greater length later, but this will make things very difficult for Bowersock, and over the long term for the City and the University of Kansas Boathouse.  In essence FERC had to do this because there was a report on file that suggested the dam could be in imminent danger of failing.  Since they are responsible for “dam safety,” they had to take action and require Bowersock to put less pressure on the dam by keeping the levels as low as possible.  We hope to remedy this by expediting our dam repair project.  We are working hard with the City of Lawrence to make this happen.  Later I’ll give a full explanation of why the City of Lawrence is responsible for maintenance of the dam, but in short, the dam backs up water for the City’s water supply.  So once we received the order from FERC, we went out on the dam last Monday and again today to try to get the boards down.  Monday we had ice, weather, and equipment issues.  Usually we don’t get out on the dam when the water is this high.  Today Rich and I went out on the dam to try to drop 15 doors.  We were making some changes to how we wanted to use the cable way and all of the sudden the river came up about a foot.  This was probably due to an ice jam breaking upstream.  (It is warm today!)  When the supports started cracking behind the doors we hustled off the dam pretty quickly.  The water levels are projected to go down another 1,000 cfs over the weekend so we’ll give it another shot on Monday.  Here are some photos of us beginning the process of getting the doors down before the water came up.  It’s not worth it to get anyone hurt and given that those doors weigh around 700 lbs. we need to be really cautious in this undertaking.

This was just before the water came up.

Rich and Sarah get ready to drop the doors.

It looks like we may have a good hand here.  Touch wood… Currently we have low water below 2,000 cfs predicted for early next week.  The Corps has been very responsive and communicative as we have worked for this window which has been extremely helpful.  Barring any major precipitation we have scheduled a visit from the FERC Chicago Office to come down and inspect the dam which is planned for 8:00 AM on Tuesday morning.  Wouldn’t you know we would get low water right in the midst of the inaugural speech.  Never mind that, we are grateful for the opportunity to get out on the dam.  We are rounding up our crew to get out there and it looks like we may even have some warmer weather early next week.

A note on the history on the site, Dad has said there are quite a few errors which we are going to correct asap.  It just requires a window of time to sit down and do it.  The website was originally put together with a grant from the Kansas Corporation Commission.  Pinnacle Technology put most of it together for us and they did a very good job with the information they had available.  We’ll continue to try to put more time into the website to make sure all the history is accurate and that we keep it up to date.  We are glad to see that we even have people that read it from time to time!  Feel free to send in comments about Bowersock if you have some history about which we might not be aware!

We spoke with the Corps of Engineers today and it looks like we won’t have a window to work on the dam until mid-January or more likely February.  The Corps keeps water in the reservoirs for waterfowl season until the lakes start to freeze, at which point they drop the levels to try to minimize freezing damage to docks, marinas, etc.  Between the natural flows and reservoir management it doesn’t look like we’ll get our window for work any time soon.  Both the City of Lawrence and Bowersock have planned repairs that require the river CFS to be around 2,000.  Doing dam repairs and replacing missing doors in February could be a pretty brutal task, but if we don’t do it before the rains start in March it is likely we wouldn’t be able to get out on the dam again until next August.

What do we mean by good water?  If we didn’t need low water for dam and batter boards repairs, we’d say we have pretty good water for power production today - especially since most of our batter boards (or doors) are down.  We have about 8,000 cfs in the river, which would be too much if we had the boards up (we’d be worried about them getting knocked down again) but is a-okay since they are almost all down anyway.

What we really need right now though is low water - in the 2,000 cfs and below range.  We are waiting for the water to come down so we can make some long-awaited repairs to the dam and our boards.  We haven’t been able to get out on  the dam to do any serious work since April of 2007.  The water’s just been too high.  Once this water comes down then the City can get out there to do repairs on the dam (the City depends on the dam for their water intakes) and we can replace all the boards that have been ripped off the dam since April of ‘07.  My Dad always says, “God and the Corps deal the cards, we just play the hand.”  We are hopeful for extended sun and relatively warm weather so we can get this work done before winter sets in.