Campbell River, BC
September, 2023
Contractor: TCI Manufacturing Inc.
Project summary
The John Hart Dam, located in Campbell River, British Columbia, underwent a seismic upgrade requiring de-stumping, drilling, and dredging near the town’s drinking water supply. To prevent water supply contamination, a custom Type 4 Turbidity Curtain was designed, installed, and tested to ensure zero suspended solids (zero NTU) at the intake.
Solution
The turbidity curtain used in this project measured approximately 1500 meters in length (5000 linear feet), with depths ranging from 10 to 30 meters (30 to 100 feet). Its construction featured a double-wall design with two parallel curtains to ensure complete sediment exclusion. The curtain was tailored to follow the reservoir’s bathymetric profile, providing a tight seal at the bottom.
The installation process took four weeks and involved a team of ten workers. The key steps included unpackaging and laying out each curtain section on shore, connecting sections using aluminum extrusions, self-locking toggle pins, zip ties, and quick links, and deploying the connected curtain sections into the water. After positioning, the furled curtain was dropped, and the anchors were deployed.
Commercial divers conducted a dye test at three different elevations in three different locations. No dye leaks were found, confirming the curtain’s effectiveness.
Results
The project successfully prevented water supply contamination during the de-stumping, drilling, and dredging operations necessary for the seismic upgrade, ensuring zero suspended solids (zero NTU) at the intake.
Features & benefits
The Type 4 Turbidity Barrier is our most robust offering in this line. It is built to be impermeable to exclude all sediment from the protected area. It is built with a reinforced body fabric that makes it very strong and able to withstand some flow as well as greater depths. They are built with heavy duty connection hardware and upgraded floatation. There are other curtains in our product group built with permeable fabric in the body to allow some flow through them, designed for light and medium duty applications. Turbidity Barriers reduce the environmental impact of construction by keeping suspended material in a contained area until it can settle out and be removed if necessary. To learn more about Turbidity Barriers, click here.
