Spring Restart: Inside the Penstock

The ice is out, the pond is receding, and the 2026 season is underway — starting from the inside.

While the water was still too high to work at the headgate, we went where the water isn't: inside the penstock. The six-foot steel tube that carries water to the turbine is getting a full internal rehabilitation — scaling off decades of rust deposits, assessing the steel underneath, and preparing the interior for its protective coating. It's tight, dark, loud work, and it's exactly the kind of job you save for when the rest of the site is unavailable.

As the pond dropped, we got our first look at how the coffer dam wintered. Verdict: mostly intact, with battle scars. Two of the one-ton bags toppled over the winter and took the primary plastic liner with them; one bag was unrecoverable in water still cold enough to make retrieval a bad idea. The coffer dam will need proper restoration before headgate work resumes — this time rebuilt stronger, with last year's lessons applied.

We also completed a piece of overdue demolition: the main support beams for the trash rack and headgate system came out. These timbers had been quietly rotting for decades, and they were never going to carry the new trash rack. Their replacements will be steel, engineered, and grouted into the stone — part of a completely redesigned trash rack support system going in this season.

The worklist is long but the path is clear. This is the year the water side gets finished.