NK, CC residents having say on Walker’s Dam design

New Kent and Charles City residents, who have a stake in the outcome of rehabilitation work on Walker’s Dam, are providing the dam’s owners, Newport News Waterworks, with input on several design issues that remain unresolved.

Waterworks officials hosted a public meeting last Wednesday at the New Kent Forestry Center that attracted residents from both counties who were asked to comment on the dam’s height, boat lock operation, fishing near the dam, and a proposed fishing pier.

Repairs to the 65-year-old dam on the Chickahominy River at Lanexa evolved from the structure failing in April 2007 and the boat lock collapsing about six weeks later. Work to stabilize the dam and restore normal water levels in Chickahominy Lake, which is formed by the dam, ended last February at a cost of close to $3.7 million.

Now comes a more expensive ($10-12 million) second phase to basically rebuild the dam. Design work is just beginning with actual construction slated to start next spring. Completion is expected by fall 2010.

“We’ll come out of this essentially with a new dam, new boat lock, new fish ladder, and new pier,” Waterworks director Brian Ramaley said at Wednesday’s meeting.

Waterworks’ goal, he said, is to adjust the dam’s height so that salt water brought upstream on tides does not flow into the lake. That would mean increasing the dam’s current 3-foot height to 4 feet.

“We want people’s input on what impact that will have on them,” Ramaley said.

Increasing the height would suit Charles City resident Oliver Whitehead just fine. Whitehead regularly fishes near the dam, especially during the herring run each spring. After discussing the issues with Waterworks officials last Wednesday, he said he definitely favors a 4-foot height.

Jill O’Brien-Jones and her husband, John Jones, who operate Eagles Landing, a business catering fishermen on the lake, also favor a height increase, but only to three-and-a-half feet.

Both the Joneses and Whitehead have similar suggestions for a new boat lock — something much easier for boaters to operate than the mechanism in use before the dam failed. Waterworks officials, meanwhile, are considering a plan whereby a new boat lock would be opened according to a printed schedule and an attendant would be hired to operate the lock.

“Don’t put the boat lock on a schedule. That will only make people mad,” Whitehead said as he busily wrote down remarks to pass on to Waterworks officials.

Jones, meanwhile, said, “Operating manually would be fine if they put an electric motor where the crank was.”

Conceptual drawings show the dam’s fish ladder, now located at the Charles City end, placed between the boat lock and the New Kent shoreline. The new lock, expected to be 15×30 feet, is being built in the same spot as the collapsed lock.

Also, plans are being advanced for a fishing pier to be located 100 feet off the New Kent shore. A walkway reaches the 10-foot-wide pier that will extend 180 feet, parallel to the shoreline and just downstream from the dam.

“The pier is very preliminary right now,” Ramaley said. “We need to work out the details on exactly where to put it with the Rockahock Campground owners.”

A fishing pier is expected to offset Waterworks’ plans to deny public access to the dam, Ramaley said.

“For security and safety reasons, we can’t have people clamoring around the dam,” he said. “This is the key water supply for 500,000 people so we would like to protect it a little better than we have in the past.

“The dam became a fishing spot despite our efforts to discourage it,” he added. “We don’t want to be the grinches who stop fishing, but we do want to make it safe.”

Anyone having questions or concerns about the dam project and its impact can call the Waterworks Public Information Office at (757) 926-1155.