Jess and I were up on the upper Madison today working on a video project, and stopped to grab a few pics of the activity around the dam.  Interesting to see security in place along the road and on the dam today.  These are all Jess’ pics today. 

BTW, Mike over at Madison River Fishing Company has the latest poop on the plan in his update today – here it is -

The work continues at Hebgen. Most of the trucks containing parts of a huge barge are on-site now. They are waiting on a couple more before they begin assembly. It should take a day or two to get the thing put together. The enormous crane is up there and ready. Crews are furiously moving dirt to create a ramp for the crane to move down to the lakeshore and be driven onto the barge. This will likely happen mid-week or so. Engineers are working on two different contingency plans to get a finger stuck in the dike. They are back to other forms of bulkhead plans very likely placed in the interior of the intake tower. These would be similar to the plan they first tried except with a bigger bulkhead and a much bigger crane.

At the moment they are also preparing to try one last ditch effort at the stoplog approach. They have bound four of the 12×12 logs together in an attempt at filling the void that single logs were getting sucked into a couple days ago. If this fails they will then have a better picture of the damage to the interior face on the tower. We will likely see a temporary spike in flow today as a result of this attempt. The flow has actually decreased slightly over the past 48 hours. This is, unfortunately, due to loss of “head” or pressure on the water as the lake draws down and not to any fix.

With a water elevation loss of nearly 6 inches every 24 hours Hebgen will be at it’s springtime level by Wednesday. Rain and the loss of head pressure may slow this a bit but it’ll be close. As we draw near this milestone the chances of long-term implications become greater. The likelihood of refilling the reservoir diminishes the odds of negatively effecting spawning goes up and the dangers of thermal issues next summer loom larger. Counting on a huge snowpack this coming winter and spring is a tenuous bet at best.

The next picture below is another view of the crane looking down the axis of the dam; we assume the two large red sections in front of the crane are ramps for the barge.  The smaller excavator to the left is preparing the ramp for the crane to be loaded on the barge. 

Here’s the partially assembled barge; the story goes that there are 11 sections to be assembled together - there are only 7 connected in the picture here…..

We’ll have more up when we can….

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