Army Corps Begins Rehabilitation of Lockport Canal Walls
By Corporate Communications

Photo of Lockport Lock, Lockport, Illinois
Photo of Lockport Lock, Lockport, Illinois
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Rock Island District, in coordination with the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago (MWRD), has begun a multi-year repair program of the Chicago Sanitary Ship Canal embankments along the three-mile upper pool approach area to Lockport Lock in Lockport, Ill.

Stage One of the project was awarded to Bencor Corporation of America, for $25,381,736, to construct a concrete cut-off wall for approximately 4,300 feet of the right-descending embankment. In January 2008, Bencor will construct a test section that includes trenching and injecting a concrete mixture landward of the embankment. The test section will demonstrate the effectiveness of this embankment repair method. Tree clearing along the dike embankment occurred in 2007.

The project is located within a three-mile reach of the Lockport Lock Pool of the Illinois Waterway (river mile 291.0 - 294.1) at Lockport, Ill. As part of the Chicago Sanitary Ship Canal, which extends from the Chicago River to the Illinois Waterway, the Lockport upper pool is a perched pool (38-feet above the surrounding area), with a roughly forty-five-foot-high embankment on the right descending bank and concrete guide walls on the left descending bank.

The program, estimated to cost approximately $132 million when complete, rehabilitates the aging infrastructure to maintain structural integrity, continued retention of the navigation pool, stability of the embankments and substructures, safe access to Lockport Lock and the hydropower plant, and continued safe use of the controlling works.

The MWRD, through congressional action, transferred operations and maintenance responsibilities of the controlling works and powerhouse substructures, and all pool retention structures to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in the early 1980s. Due to a history of sinkholes and surface slumping, the Rock Island District has made significant improvements to the embankments' structural stability and erosion resistance with the addition of rock fill. To prevent further sinkhole development, a shallow cutoff trench was constructed in the early 1990s and although it performed satisfactorily for nearly 11 years, sinkhole development resumed in 2001.