INNOVATION November-December 2017

F E A T U R E

on function than aesthetics, did the job for more than 50 years. However, says Kimberley’s former Director of Operations, Mike Fox, now with the Regional District of North Okanagan, “by the time I was hired eight years ago, its time was fast coming to an end. I was asked in my initial interview with the city what I saw as the biggest challenge and I said it’s the flume going through the middle of town. If it failed, there are houses right up

to it on each side, gas lines, sewer lines, power poles.” In early 2011, as Fox feared, the flume did indeed begin to fail. As a stopgap, city staff braced the walls across the flume horizontally with blue light standards, while Fox began the process of “finding an engineering company to help us.” But, no one was willing to take on such a big project as quickly as the city required. “They said they’d need a couple of years of planning, which we just didn’t have time for, and they’d need to start at the upper reaches and work down, which was too risky because of logs coming down with the next freshet.” Luckily, Cori Barraclough, freshwater ecologist and co-founder of Aqua-Tex Scientific Consulting Ltd., was already working with Fox on a different project, and knew exactly the right person to pull into a quick planning conversation. She, Fox, and senior hydrotechnical engineer Brian LaCas, P.Eng., of LaCas Consultants Inc., took a walk around the failing flume and immediately began to envision how the flume could be made safe, functional and beautiful. “I grew up in Kimberley,” says Barraclough, even working summers in the mines nearby, “and could see that this was an opportunity for me to help restore the creek, and give back to the community.” LaCas, too, saw the chance to work on what he calls a “legacy project, one you get maybe once in your career. I said to Mike that you shouldn’t just replace the flume, you should really go for it and create an urban river. And lo and behold, Cori and I received an RFP and put a team and a proposal together, which the city accepted.” A VISION FOR THE FUTURE The team’s proposal suggested removing the existing concrete flume, six metres wide and two metres deep, including the steel rails embedded in the channel

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