Minnesota Limited
Lloyd Pedersen
Project Manager
In late 2013, Lloyd Pedersen of Minnesota Ltd. was tasked with the job of checking the integrity of a pipeline, dating back to the 1960s, in Whitewater, WI. Part of the pipeline lies about 3 feet below the lakebed of Meade Lake, which is often dry. However, after a fairly wet summer, it held water about 24 to 36 inches deep.
“It’s a small lake; we call it a duck pond,” says Pedersen. Duck pond or not, he needed access to the pipeline, and this meant clearing out the water in the area of the integrity dig.
“You have to do something with all that water,” he explains. “You have to have some type of cofferdam, whether it’s sheet piling or an aqua barrier. We chose to go with the aqua barrier, from Dam-It Dams.
“We reached out to Jack Nichols of Dam-It Dams because we had seen his dams before. He was on another project, and he came up and gave us a little guidance about what they are made out of and we decided to go with him. At one point he showed up with a little mini-dam rolled up with the geotextile fabric and bags on the inside, just to show everybody how it worked, and that was impressive.
“One of the advantages of the Dam-It Dams cofferdams is the way individual dams are combined to form a complete unit. “There is a collar that is used to pair them up next to each other. Other aqua dam companies will have individual dams, but then you have to overlap them, and you lose a lot of your linear footage. But with the Dam-It Dams, there is a collar that attaches them together, and it is then one continuous dam.”