It should really be called the “Getting rid of Cantrell Dam Project,” since it will not exist after it is completed.
July 2020 about five inches of rain fell in an hour in the southwestern portion of the city. Much of the subsequent damage to private and public property downstream was caused by the dam holding back and then failing, releasing a torrential packet of water that had much more force than it would have had if there were no dam at all.
The Office of the State Engineer’s dam inspection engineer came to examine the structure and insisted that it be fixed in a “timely” manner. The dam never held back enough water–15 acre feet–to be on the OSE’s regular dam inspection list, but the OSE has the legal authority to insist smaller, “non-jurisdictional” dams be fixed.
July 2021, the city commission approved the receival of a $450,000 grant, a $300,000 loan and a $75,000 cash-match obligation from the New Mexico Finance Authority’s Water Trust Board fund, the total $825,000 going to engineering fees to design the Cantrell Dam fix.
The city commission approved giving the project to Wilson & Company, the city’s on-call engineering firm for several years.
Four years later, that design is complete. The city commission, at the July 9 meeting, further accepted and approved funding from NMFA’s Water Trust Board for construction costs.
The city will receive $7,281,000 in grant money, will take out a 20-year $809,000 loan at .25 interest and will put up a $809,000 cash match, which totals $8.9 million.
Sandy Jones, the governor-appointed flood commissioner for Sierra County, who oversees the expenditure of the flood control tax revenue, has committed $400,000 to the project, which will be used as part of the cash match, City Manager Gary Whitehead told city commissioners.
The plans include “breaching” or tearing down Cantrell Dam. The city really has no choice, the Wilson & Co. engineer explained about a year ago during a city commission meeting. No original plans for the dam could be found. Without plans, the city couldn’t prove it had fixed or restored the dam to its original function. Whole new plans would have to be created, the engineer said, and the dam’s capacity would have to be enlarged to hold back at least 15 acre feet so it could fall under the jurisdiction and oversight of the OSE. The city, in the meantime, had liability exposure for the non-functionality of the dam, the engineer said. He recommended not fixing the dam, but doing away with it, because the dam still wouldn’t hold back enough water to protect the southwestern portion of the city and the Village of Williamsburg from a similar event.
The plans not only include doing away with Cantrell Dam, but putting in different flood-control infrastructure, such as expanding the capacity of three arroyos and putting in a concrete culvert at the end of one of them. In addition a big retention pond will be built.
The two NMFA grant/loan/cash deals come to $9.725 million: $7.731 million grant, $1.109 million loan and $884,000 cash match.
For more information on the 2020 flood damage and four-year engineering plans and changes, please see past reporting:
https://sierracountycitizen.org/cantrell-dam-costs-swell-to-nearly-8-million/
https://sierracountycitizen.org/fixing-cantrell-dam-may-not-be-worth-it/
https://sierracountysun.org/feature/july-26-torrential-downpour-cantrell-dams-malfunctionCan-part-2/
Another endless rabbit hole of incompetence and malfeasance to figure out what hapoened.
And the common denominators are rolf and Wilson Engineering.
It’s counter intuitive that a dam caused harm by being constructed. The questions must be, “Why was the dam built and who approved the project?” The clue may be in the missing audit trail beginning with the disappearance of the construction drawings.
Finally, “How long did it take to figure out the dam was unnecessary or in fact a nuisance?”
I asked those questions and received partial answers in prior articles, which are linked at the bottom.
Essentially nobody knows why it was built and by whom.
The engineers took less than a year to determine the dam was too expensive to redesign and renovate for the little amount of water it would hold back.
Climate change has changed the game. . . the dam may have been fine, but now it is inadequate for microbursts and severe weather events.
I bet Wilson Eng built it under cover of night!
Just kidding. But t or c is an incredibly lucrative “forever contract” for Wilson where we write checks but nothing gets done!