After hearing a presentation from city staff given by Mr. Seward and listening to 12 delegations it appears as if city council is now wanting more information before spending between $3 - $8 million on a problem that has still not been proven to exist.
As explained before on this blog, the information coming before council has been based on a lot of hypothesis and a whole lot of speculation and conjecture. This was the same type of hypothesis about the possible outcome of a dam failure during a seismic event which of course has been proven to have been a pure work of fantasy.
After spending about $2.5 million on the original seismic threat, attention was given to the overtopping threat posed by inadequate spillways.The most recent $1.4 million study has concluded that even in an event with a highly unlikely possibility of happening there would be no loss of life and less than $3 million in damage as a result.
Spending $8 million to mitigate a $3 million risk always seemed to me to be logic only city hall would support.
After all of this money spent on studies and reports it is still not proven under what conditions the dams 'might' over-top, it has not been proven if this overtopping would result in all of the berm washing away, and finally even if all of the berm were washed away, it is not known the dam would fail. Why? Because after spending all of these tax dollars it is still not known if the dams would fail because the modelling studies needed have not been done.
A motion brought by Councillor Kipp and supported by Bestwick, Pattje, McKay and Anderson will hopefully result in council finally having complete information before them, before they make a final decision on Colliery Dam.
The new testing should be done by an unbiased firm that has not already been involved in this dam issue. Golder has gotten a large slice of the pie already and should not be involved, what so ever, with the new testing. Unbiased being the key word.
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