Heavy Civil Brecksville Dam Removal

Water Quality of the Cuyahoga River

The water quality of the Cuyahoga River was improved by the removal of the Canal Diversion Dam and the remnants of the Pinery Dam. The removal of these structures will help work toward achieving the goals of the Clean Water Act and Ohio’s Water Quality Standards. As the Cuyahoga has an aquatic life use designation, specific criteria such as pH, dissolved oxygen, and temperature will be directly improved as a result of the removal of the dams. Aquatic life will be able to move more freely up and down the river after the removal of these obstructions. The project provides a pathway equal to or greater than the actual river bed to facilitate the aquatic life and habitat. Kokosing also employed a number of protective measures (active and passive) in order to protect the river and its aquatic life
from any potential issues.

Demolition of Dam

For the dam removal, Kokosing positioned an excavator with a large jack hammer attachment at the dam’s eastern wing wall and the hoe ram reached out as far as capable to start removing a section of the dam. This started the draining of the dam pool and helped to lower the water level. Once the water level was lowered, Kokosing crawled the hoe ram down into the river and removed the rest of the eastern half of the dam. A track loader was used to move the rubble over to the eastern bank.
Kokosing placed the rubble on the eastern bank that currently has rubble and shows some signs of washout and over potentially to the eastern pier of the SR82 Bridge. The eastern pier does not have as much rip rap protection as the western pier, and this helped balance out protection. The two wing walls were left to help support the banks.

After removal of the dam, the excavator moved upstream to remove the Pinery Dam.