Lake Louise Culvert Replacement Project on the Horizon

By Holly Crocco

Kent residents who live in the Lake Louise community are happy to hear that the long-awaited culvert replacement project is expected to begin construction by the fall.

“It’s about time you get an explanation of what’s going on,” Highway Superintendent Richard Othmer told residents gathered at the Feb. 17 Kent Town Board meeting, who came to hear an update from project engineers.

“We have 14 small bridges that we’re in charge of in the Town of Kent,” he explained. “Most of them were built between 1920, with the coming of the Model T and the car… and the 1950s.”

As such, many of those bridges have been approaching 70 to 100 years old, with 10 of them being replaced in-house already. “They were not built for the heavy traffic that we have today – concrete trucks, oil trucks, septic trucks,” said Othmer. “They all had to be replaced.”

The Lake Louise bridge, however, remains.

According to Othmer, property records indicate that the first house was likely built in the South Lake community in 1940. By the 1950s, the area became a neighborhood, and about 105 houses now exist there.

In 2018, the state Department of Environmental Conservation rated the culvert a “class B/medium hazard,” saying it was “unsound, deficiently recognized, and in poor condition.”

After applying to for a grant through the Bridge NY program and being rejected in 2017, the town won a $1 million grant in 2021 to renovate the bridge and the spillway. “Here we are, five years later, we’re finally going to get this going,” said Othmer.

The town does not have to match any of the funding for the grant.

Jeremy Bourdeau, senior associate at Barton & Loguidice consulting firm, explained that anything less than 20 feet in span is considered a culvert; it could be a small pipe under your driveway or a large concrete pipe. “We call it a culvert, most call it a bridge… It’s semantics,” he said.

The culvert at the south end of Lake Louise Drive, at the intersection of South Lake Road, is a small one that spans over the spillway. If it wasn’t for the earth dam that impounds the lower lake and which carries Lake Louise Drive on top of it, there would be no lake, noted Bourdeau.

“That 300-foot-long earth dam is a very critical part of this, because the original project had nothing to do with the earth dam – it was just replacing the concrete culvert,” he explained. “But as soon as you start working on an earth dam, you have to bring it into compliance under DEC regulations and, in this case, it started to be more of a challenge and more costly than just replacing the culvert.”

The project is limited to the immediate culver approaches (75 feet on each side). “Basically whatever it would take for us to get that culvert out, drop a new one in, replace the approaches – that’s all that can be paid for under this funding,” said Bourdeau.

Currently, the culvert is cracking and spalling, with erosion at the base of the concrete foundations, and debris blocking outflow. The roadway on top of the earth dam is narrow, limited to one lane, has non-standard guiderails, pavement deterioration, a steep embankment slope on the downstream side, and the embankment is overgrown with vegetation and some seepage has been noted at the downstream toe of the embankment.

Bourdeau noted that the dam crest, or road elevation, needs to be raised to bring it into compliance, but the Bridge NY funding doesn’t cover that. So engineers came up with a phased approach to first replace the culvert and spillway with the grant funding, then appeal for additional funding for phase two – which would be to install a concrete dam structure or wall on the upstream side of the roadway to raise the dam crest and provide a new structurally-sound dam.

“So, we basically build a more robust concrete wall just on the lake side of the road that would serve as the dam for the future,” said Bourdeau.

As part of phase one, engineers will increase the spillway capacity to meet or exceed design flood requirements, per DEC guidelines. Bourdeau explained that they have to balance the height of the earth dam with the size of the structure, so that water can pass without flooding. To do so, engineers will replace the culvert, reconstruct part of Lake Louise Drive over the culvert, and improve geometric conditions.

This will increase the size of the structure from the current 6 to 8 feet, to about 14 to 16 feet in width. It will allow for two lanes, while not making the culvert “excessively wide,” allowing for cars to pass, introducing standard rails, and making it safer for vehicles.

Engineers are working on the final design for phase one, with approvals anticipated in March, bidding to start in May, and construction starting in July or August, with a November finish date.

Phase two would extend the concrete wall all the way to the end of the earth dam. “Basically, you’re taking what’s now an earth dam with a road on top of it… That just becomes a road, and you have a concrete wall there that serves as the earth dam,” said Bourdeau.

South Lake resident Stephan Beffre thanked the town, county, and engineers for their advocacy.

“We’ve been fighting for a long time to make some improvements along South Lake,” he said. “This lake has a lot of issues and it’s been neglected for a really long time. We know these dams are all at risk of failure and it may not carry substantial risk for private property damage, but it could lead to potential drainage of our lake if they were to fail.”

According to Beffre, the mean depth of the lake is only 3 feet.

“So we cannot afford to lose any water whatsoever,” he said. “It’s a manmade lake – it needs maintenance. And no one wants to live on a swamp… If we don’t eventually dredge this lake, during my lifetime, we will eventually see this lake become a swamp. And our home values will plummet.”

According to Bourdeau, the county plans to lower the upper dam and abandon it in place, decommissioning it. The middle dam will be remediated with the clearing of trees, replacing the spillway with concrete, and restoring the surface to gravel for future maintenance.