OGDEN VALLEY, Utah — There's something you won't see much of at Pineview Reservoir if you go by — water.
Construction is underway at Pineview to replace a decades old pipeline that carries drinking water for people who live in Ogden. Reservoir levels were dropped to about 2 percent of capacity. Crews started work on Monday and are building a platform that goes through the reservoir to move heavy equipment.
Next, we'll see a temporary pipeline on top, while the new one goes underground.
"That pipeline is going to be a bigger size pipeline than the size that we currently have,” explained Justin Anderson, Ogden City Public Services Executive Director. “The reason why that pipeline is going to be oversized is looking forward to the future,” he added.
WATCH | Construction underway at Pineview Reservoir to fix old Ogden drinking water pipeline
He said they are building redundancies into the pipelines and making space to expand in the future without having to drop reservoir levels down in the future, if needed.
We have also received some of your questions about is what happens to the fish in the reservoir.
"We have worked with the division of wildlife to be able to provide to them funding to where they can install over 1,000 new habitat structures in the reservoir for fish populations, to help fish rebound that might be affected due to this work,” Anderson added.
He shared in a typical water year, the reservoir should fill back up to capacity. He said one reason they even did the project this year instead of next year as they initially planned was because water levels were low anyway, so they wouldn’t have to drop levels down much further. Anderson said this year, they also have more space at other reservoirs to send the water from Pineview too, like to Willard Bay.
Officials said they expect to finish this Pineview crossing phase of the $100 million project by January 1, 2027 so the reservoir can fill up with snow melt around that time. But the full project will take a couple more years to complete.
"The draw down, we acknowledge came a little bit faster especially toward the end to get to this point, but the natural draw down for the bulk of the summer was about where it was going to be, till we got toward the end,” said Jeffrey Putzke, public involvement manager with Sunrise Engineering. “The good news is, we pushed a lot of water supply to irrigators, so that combined with all these repairs, things are coming along just as planned,” he added.