It's been a rough go for the city repairing and reinforcing the Canadian Pacific Railway Weir. But the final result is nearing completion.

Mitch Minken, general manager of infrastructure and operations was on hand at Monday's council meeting to discuss the challenges that the project has faced and what remains to be done to bring it over the finish line.

Originally slated in May of 2019 to come in at a little less than five hundred thousand dollars, the project quickly met with complications once the work had begun and it was discovered that emergency works were going to be required to repair previously unseen scour holes that had formed.

These repairs would require additional funds to be approved from city council, which they did in September of that year.

Further complications had beset the project since:  A previously unknown requirement that necessitated a rescue boat and water rescue person to be on-site while crews were working.  A water release from Duncairn Dam that resulted in the loss of a turbidity curtain.  Support structures that were found to be in worse shape than initially thought, and an earlier than normal start to winter conditions.

Each issue was dealt with as it came up, but each impacted the project in both time and money. 

Despite the setbacks, the main construction work on the weir rehabilitation is complete; with most of the wood structure being replaced or restored with like-for-like material designed to retain its original design due to the weirs status as a heritage site.

At the council meeting a further, hopefully final, $170,000 was approved to close out the project.

"We've got some work to do on the bank on the east side of the downstream side of the weir just to do some bank restoration," Minken explained.

With the completion of that small amount of work, the city will finally be able to close the book on what Minken calls one of the most challenging projects he's dealt with.

"We had no drawings or anything from the last reconstruction on the weir, which we believe probably happened sometime in the fifties. So we were going into it without much research or not knowing what was there. As we uncovered things and started to work, things came up that required attention."

In her questioning, councillor Pat Friesen said that the increased cost above the first estimate back in May was "unfortunate", but likened the project to performing renovations on an old house, saying "Once you get into it you have no idea what's going to be there."

In the end, the $170,000 to cap off the weir rehabilitation project came from money that was leftover from last year's street and lane paving project; money that Minken explains had been left unspent due to a busy 2019 and unfortunate delays which left some paving projects incomplete.

"2019 was impacted quite dramatically by the summer games and having to take some time off during the construction season to allow the games to happen without having streets torn up. So in 2019, we ran into a couple of problems with contractor availability and at the end of the year when we would normally have been able to do more work we didn't because of weather."

He says that while normally that money would be carried over to the new year to carry on with the same paving projects, in this case, they chose to move it to the weir since it came from the same funding pool.

The newly rehabilitated weir is expected to last for the next fifty years.