Harvey Lake Dam

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Created on Tuesday, 02 December 2014 18:01
Written by Yolanda Liang

barnet damVermont - The Barnet select board took over an hour last night discussing about ways to fix the Harvey Lake Dam, which has taken the town ten years to get to this point.  The dam was built in the early 1970s and got maintenance more or less in a year, but this is the first major repair of the dam.

 The ways of operation and the cost are two big concerns of fixing the dam. 

The Barnet select board chair Jeremy Roberts said, "there is a lot of different ways we are looking at. That is what stalled so long as we were trying to have a simplistic design that was just basically a gate system, which was manually operated with hand cranked style."

"Also, a different organization wants it fully automated, so we were kind of trying to find a happy medium," Roberts added.

The first basic and simple design was around $23,000. However, the price bumps up if the board decides to do with a different style design.

"We would like to do a peace meal, and we don't necessarily need to be spend that much money up front," Roberts said. "The different style design is up around $50,000 to $70,000. That's why we are trying to scale back and suggested to have it itemized. "

It is still hard to say whether the town would choose the manual- or automatic- operation. But, considering about the possible factors such as bad weather condistion and out of energy, Roberts said he personally would prefer to have manual-operation as a back up plan.

Also, the town hopes to avoid sediment and pollution going into the lake while fixing the dam.