The St. Paul District celebrated the completion of the Diversion Inlet Structure, the first major piece of federal infrastructure for the Fargo-Moorhead Metropolitan Area Flood Risk Management Project at a dedication ceremony at Fargo City Hall, in Fargo, North Dakota, Oct. 27.
The Fargo-Moorhead Metropolitan Area Flood Risk Management Project, which the Corps is building in partnership with the Metro Flood Diversion Authority, or MFDA, and the cities of Fargo, North Dakota, and Moorhead, Minnesota, includes a 30-mile-long stormwater diversion channel west of Fargo and a 22-mile-long embankment designed to temporarily stage floodwaters upstream of the Fargo-Moorhead metro area.
The project is being implemented using split delivery, in which the Corps of Engineers is building the Southern Embankment and all its associated features, and the MFDA is building the stormwater diversion channel and all its associated features. The MFDA is using a public-private partnership, or P3, to deliver the stormwater diversion channel, which is the first time this type of contracting mechanism has been used as part of a Corps of Engineers’ project. This approach, which requires the selected P3 developer to design, build, finance, operate and maintain the stormwater diversion channel for the next 30 years, has already garnered several notable awards for the Corps of Engineers and MFDA to include the 2023 National Academy of Construction’s Recognition of Special Achievement Award.
The Diversion Inlet Structure, located near Horace, North Dakota, is one of three gated structures that will regulate flow through the embankment and is the first of the three to be completed. It is a concrete structure with three 50-foot-wide Tainter gates that will regulate flows into a stormwater diversion channel. The Corps of Engineers awarded a $46 million contract to Ames Construction, Inc., of Burnsville, Minnesota, to build this structure in 2016 and construction began in 2017.
he dedication ceremony included remarks from Sen. John
Hoeven; Mr. Michael Connor, Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil Works; representatives from the offices of Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Sen. Kevin Cramer and Sen. Tina Smith’s offices; Col. Eric Swenson, district commander; and Dr. Tim Mahoney, Fargo mayor and MFDA chair.
The ceremony also included the unveiling of a dedication plaque that will be permanently installed on the structure. Swenson said, the plaque marks the “special partnership and relationships that have been created to get this far in the project.”
Assistant Secretary Connor said he attended the ceremony because this project “is a big deal to the Army’s civil works program overall.” He said federal priorities for the civil works program include the need to innovate with the respect to building climate resilient infrastructure and the need to modernize what we build, how we build it and who we build it for. “This project is significant with moving forward with all of these priorities,” he said.
Hoeven remarked that “the Diversion Inlet Structure is the hinge between the embankment and the channel, so it really brings together what the Corps of Engineers, what the federal effort is, in terms of the embankment and the three (structures), and then the channel work, which is the public private partnership, which is really that public local/state effort. It represents the uniqueness and just the fantastic nature of this project. This is the first of its kind in the nation, and I believe it’s going to be a model for many other projects around the country.”
This project, once complete, will provide flood risk management for nearly 260,000 people and 70 square miles of infrastructure in the communities of Fargo, Moorhead, West Fargo, Horace, and Harwood.
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| Date Taken: | 11.07.2023 |
| Date Posted: | 11.07.2023 13:32 |
| Story ID: | 457389 |
| Location: | FARGO, NORTH DAKOTA, US |
| Web Views: | 78 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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