MAID OF THE MIST DRYDOCK PROJECT

Challenging project earns multiple national awards

Some say that Niagara Fall is one of Mother Nature’s most amazing feats of engineering. But the new winter storage facility easily rivals her for the honors.

Just downstream from Niagara Falls, where 600,000 gallons of water travel every second, the new dry dock facility includes a 20-foot high reinforced concrete retaining wall at he water’s edge, a 90-food high permanent crane to lift the boats out of the water and new elevator access to the Niagara Gorge.

When it came time to dredge a large, beloved lake, the project team wanted to know how long it would take the sediment to dry enough to be loaded into trucks.

So our team rigged a very large bag filled with lake sediment and hung it out to dry. Literally. Over a several-month period, we collected and measured moisture contents to determine the drying rate. Once that was identified, the project team could schedule the endeavor, using geotextile tubes to drain the material.