Opening the Lock
by Lewiston Morning Tribune

Lower Granite Dam – When Dale Garland began examining the plans to repair the downstream locks at Lower Granite Dam, he immediately noticed something was missing.

Initially, no one planned to install a temporary elevator. Although such a convenience may seem more suited to a mall than a construction site, it was vital to the success of the project, Garland says.

He is the project superintendent for Advanced American Diving, a marine construction company in Oregon City, Ore., the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers contracted for the work.

The elevator is one reason the corps is expecting to finish the work on time or ahead of schedule and open the river again.

Barring unforeseen delays, the river may open as early as the week of April 8.

With only a three-month window to complete an intensive over haul and realignment of 123-foot-tall, 372-ton lock gates, Garland has been careful not to waste even a minute of his crew's time.

Every day the lock is unnavigable leaves managers in some of the region's largest industries scrambling to find other ways to transport their products. (See related story.)

The lock at Lower Granite Dam, one of eight along the Columbia and Snakes rivers, allows vessels to make the last leg of the 465-mile journey between the coast and the western edge of Idaho.

Since the lock closed in late January, the docks at the ports of Lewiston, Clarkston and Whitman have been almost empty.

"There's always pressure to get the river open every day," say Del Gehrke, construction representative for the corps. "That's on everybody's mind all the time. That's why were doing this."

The corps wrote the contract for the work with that in mind. Garland's company could earn from $20,000 up to $200,000 a day for every day early they finish the $1.8 million project.

On the flip side, if they're late, the company could be penalized $3,800 for each day vessels can't go through the locks.

That kind of rigidity is what made Garland believe the elevator was a necessity. Without the elevator, the only access to the job site down in "the hole," as the construction crews call it, is a flight of stairs more than 100 feet tall, Garland says, "After you walk that once or twice a day, you're tired."

The elevator cuts the 10-minute trip down to one minute. Garland prefers his crews spend the time and energy on the project. For much of the time he had workers on site 20 hours a day, seven days a week.

The intensity of the workers' concentration on the job is shown in the quality of the work, Garland says. Of thousands of feet of steel that had to be welded into place, less than 10 feet needed to be redone.

For shippers, the possibility of an early resumption of service is welcome.

But no one is arguing that the work didn't need to be done.

In the mid-1990's, during an annual maintenance check-up of the dam, inspectors found extensive cracking in the bottom two feet of the lock gates.

The damage was caused by a combination of factors, says Robert Hollenbeck, the corps' project manager or the gate repair.

The gates were positioned right when the dam was finished in 1975, but after decades of use, they had started to drag on the concrete bottom of the lock, Hollenbeck says. "Things adjust and move. The Concrete moves every time you fill the lock."

During the project, temporary metal partitions have been placed at the upstream and downstream entrances to the lock to hold the Snake River back. The gates were lifted from the pivot mechanisms that allow them to swing back and forth like French doors and rested against the walls of the dry lock.

At that time, workers found metal seals on either of the lock gates had rubbed against each other so much they were concave and added replacing them to the list of tasks they needed to complete before the locks could open.

Then workers began removing cracked steel from the lock gates in sections that were from a couple inches to two feet long and welding new steel into the gates.

The pivot mechanisms were refurbished and a new rubber seal was placed on the bottom of each gate. When the gates were reattached to the lock last week, they were aligned differently than before, Hollenbeck says.

The corps knows more about what happens to metal over time and how to write specifications for steel and welding techniques than it did in 1975, Hollenbeck says. "If we can get another 50 years out of these gates, it would be fantastic."