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Show The Salt Lake Tribune UTAH Sunday, April 7, 2002 |Diamand Fork tunnel| {under construction)| Smiths. Monks Hollow, Market-Fresh Every Day Source: Central Utah Water Conservancy District Rhonda Hailes Maylett/‘The Salt Lake Tribune Tunnel Runs Into existing Syar tunnel and pipe- Tricky Problem the gas can be With ipieenssulfide levels The long tunnel wasconsid- 500 ppm, crews often had to avoid the tunnel or don gas masks and other protective gear. tunnels and pipelines that will be able to deliver about 162,500 ered the least environmentally damaging of all the alternatives, one of which was a dam at Monks Hollow that would have inundated two miles of Diamond Fork Creek. In October,less than a halfmilefrom their target, crews the 11-foot-diameter acre-feet of water per year from Strawberry Reservoir, in the logicfaults that bisect the area. used by the Strawberry Water hydrogen sulfide, began pourine inthe tunnel aa aoe 3,000 gallons per minute — twice what engineers had & Continued from B-1 The tunnelis part of the Diamond Fork System, a series of Colorado River Basin, to Utah Lake, in the Great Basin. (An acrefoot is about 326,000 gallons.) About 61,500 acre-feet are Users Association, a group of farmers in Utah County for whom.the reservoir originally was ps About85,500 acre-feet will flow directly into Utah Lake as an “exchange” for water taken outof the Provo River for urban consumptionin Salt Lake County and northern Utah County. The remaining 15,500 acre-feet are up for grabs, the subject of a pending envi- impact Putting the bulk of the 162,500 acre-feet into tunnels tunnel struck one of two geoUnderground water, saturated with corrosive and poisonous planned for. “We knew there was hydro- gen sulfide in the area but we didn’t think it was in quantities we couldn't deal with. Weall thought the risks were manageable,” said Lee Wimmer, Central Utah's assistant general manager. General Manager Don Christiansen said the district plans nolegal action against its geo-technical “The geology in that area is very unpredictable and incon- and pipelines of the Diamond Fork System will allow for sistent,” Christiansen said. “No matter how much more mere natural flews in Sixth Water and Diamond Fork creeks, which suffer from the geotechnical work you did, you wouldn't have identified all the problems weran into. approximately 90,000 acre-feet of water currently released down those streams from Strawberry. As part of the system, engineers had designed a 4%milelong tunnelthat would run di- agonally, southwest to northeast, through the middle of be canyon, connecting million (ppm).— 500 ppm, line in the upper canyon to a new 96-inch-diameterpipeline buried in the iower part of the canyon. That'slife.” A naturally occurring gas that smells like rotten eggs, hydrogensulfide causes respiratory distress and otherail- ments. The federal Occupational Safety and Health Ad- ministration prohibits workers from exposure to lev- els greater than 20 parts per regularly running above 100 ppm, occasionally surpassing No one was injured bythe gas, Lingwall said. In early January, the water pressure caused part of the tunnelwall to cave in, sendinga steady flow of debris and water 2 Liter Coca-Cola Regular oDict. Other Varieties May Vary into the tunnel. By then, sulfuric acid formed by the hydrogen sulfide also began eating away at the tunnel-boring equipment. On Jan. 3, Wimmer ordered a halt to the construction. By mid-February, the water district decided to abandon the troubled section of the tunnel. Using more than 7,000 bags of concrete, crews sealed it off, leaving the tunnel-boring machine and other equipment entombed deep inside the mountain. To get around the problem, the district has decided to build a pipeline that will connect, via a vertical shaft, to the tunnel where it crosses below Diamond Fork Creek. Thepipeline will run aboutone mile up Diamond Fork Canyon, then jog eastward, connecting with a yet-to-be-built tunnel through Tanner Ridge. That Tanner Ridge tunnel would connect with the existing Syar pipeline at Sixth Water Creek. Assoon as the Interior De- partments gives its final ap proval, probablyin the next 10 days,the pipeline construction can begin. The tunnel part, though, mayhaveto wait as Obayashi combs the globe for a new tunnel-boring machine. Salt Lake’s Finest Retirement Community. 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