With water drawn down at Pineview Reservoir, crews have begun work on a phase of the $100 million replacement of the city’s 36-inch water transmission line across the lakebed of the reservoir that officials hope to wrap up by year’s end.

On Friday, Ogden City Public Services Executive Director Justin Anderson addressed local media at the Port Ramp Marina about the project and what is planned for the coming months.

“Today we’re up here to talk about a big project that we have undertaken to fix and replace some old infrastructure that essentially comes from the well field, which is behind me, on the other side of the reservoir that goes all the way down Ogden Canyon, up the south side of the mouth of Ogden Canyon, and all the way along the Bench that ties into our 23rd Street Reservoir,” he said. “This is a 36-inch pipeline and it’s being reconstructed and rehabilitated so that we can continue to provide clean, safe drinking water and be reliable on our delivery to our customers. This portion of the project is what we kind of refer to as the Pineview Crossing portion.”

He said that Ogden City getting its drinking water from the Ogden Valley is hardly a new thing.

Rob Nielsen, Standard-Examiner

“When Ogden City was formed as a city, they found water up here, and they found a nice big artesian spring back over by where the dam is,” he said. “Ogden City operated that way for almost 70-plus years before the Bureau of Reclamation came along and proposed building Pineview Reservoir.  It was the first dam that was built on Pineview, and so at that time our infrastructure was moved, and then again in 1950s and in 1970 was the last time it was moved is when the dam was raised to this elevation and our wells all got capped underneath Pineview Reservoir.”

Anderson said the wells now provide drinking water for around 120,000 people.

He noted that, originally, this phase of the project had been proposed to begin in fall 2027, but last year’s poor snowfall coupled with the ensuing drought made it somewhat easier to bump up this portion of the project.

“Around the end of February-March when we realized that we are facing historical low snow levels in all of northern Utah, we started looking at the possibility of, ‘Could we move this forward to get completed this season?’ he said. “The reason for that is the reservoir was going to be drawn down close to where we needed it to be to be able to do this project, and so what we didn’t want to do is have it be low this year just naturally due to mother nature and then have it fill back up and then say ‘Well we weren’t ready and planning  for it so we’re going to have to draw the reservoir back down again and have it be two consecutive consecutive years.’ We felt like this would be the least impactful.”

Anderson said that several alternatives were floated, but this was the best course of action.

Rob Nielsen, Standard-Examiner

“We’ve looked at many different ways of trying to be able to cross this reservoir,” he said. “We’ve looked from being able to directional bore underneath the reservoir. We looked at being able to slip line and and just rehabilitate the the existing water pipe without putting a new pipeline in. We looked at using barges to be able to float across the reservoir and dig a new pipeline. We also looked at being able to reroute the pipeline all the way around the reservoir. After considering all these different options what we’ve determined is either environmentally or through just sheer cost that none of them were feasible except to come back and re-cross the reservoir at this spot.”

He said that water that was drawn out of the reservoir for the project was transferred into Willard Bay so that it would still be available to the system for the time being.

Anderson said the timeline for building the new pipeline across the reservoir calls for this section of the project to be wrapped up by January 1, 2027, in time for snowmelt to begin replenishing the reservoir.

The overall project timeline between Pineview Reservoir and Ogden Canyon is to finish in 2029.

“We are we are going to be ecstatic to have this portion of the project completed,” Anderson said.

Rob Nielsen, Standard-Examiner

For ore information on the project as a whole, visit https://ogdencitypipeline.com/.