http://www.dailyamerican.com/articles/2010/06/10/news/local/news095.txt
The story is basically factual, in fact I am impressed by the writer's ability to report happenings accurately.
One area where I feel amplification would help is on the history of "the valve".
The original valve was a sluice gate type and served the borough well for 40+ years.
Phase I of the Dam Remediation project included replacing this sluice gate with a new valve and adding a downstream valve to the other end of the pipe through the dam. The engineering firm chose to use duplicate gate valves for both applications. The upstream valve, normally under 50 feet of water, was a problem from day one. The downstream valve, which is not under water, has worked almost flawlessly from day one. One could conclude that either the upstream valve was a misapplication or that the valve itself has some kind of a flaw.
CME of Somerset was hired to review the situation, and has subsequently been hired to replace the original engineering firm. They recommended that the upstream valve be replaced with a new sluice gate valve. Extra precautions and money was spent to insure that the Borough got the best available. Representatives of the manufacture were here to inspect the sluice gate and supervise the installation of same. It was not until the lake returned to normal pool level that the final adjustments could be made on the sluice gate. That is when we observed, that even with the correct adjustments, the sluice gate leaked more than it should. Again, representatives of the manufacturer where here and supervised the entire operation.
It is the nature of a sluice gate to leak some, in this case, with this size sluice gate under 50 feet of water, it should leak less than a gallon per minute. The pressure of the water acting on the sluice gate helps seal it. Ours is leaking at the rate of 60 GPM.
Video of the actual situation shot on June 2nd is being sent to all parties this week. A teleconference is scheduled for next week. 60 GPM will not drain the lake, plenty of water is flowing over the spillway. The downstream valve is capable of containing the full flow, as it has done for many months. But we bought a sluice gate that should only leak about 1 GPM and all parties are working towards that result.
As Paul Harvey would say, now you know the rest of the story.
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