Fri, May 30, 2008
The forks of the Thames was whirring with the sounds of heavy construction vehicles yesterday as work began on a fountain that will propel river water 30 metres high.
The final piece of London city council's massive investment downtown, the Blackburn Memorial Fountain will have one large jet of water and six smaller ones.
"It will be awesome," said Steve Robertson, whose company, Gary D. Robinson Contracting of St. Thomas, is serving as general contractor.
If the weather remains dry and the Thames River low, the fountain could open Canada Day. "There's about a five-per- cent chance," Andrew Macpherson, the city's parks manager, said.
It's more likely the fountain will be unveiled in September, but it could be as late as November, Macpherson said.
But whenever it's completed, it will play a vital role in drawing people to the Thames and downtown, he said. "This will change the face of downtown."
The effort is a collaborative one between the city and the estate of Marjorie Blackburn, whose family once owned The Free Press and CFPL television and radio.
The Blackburn estate has donated $450,000 to build the fountain, while the city is spending $850,000 to improve landscaping and lighting and to build walkways and a viewing platform near the west bank of the river just south of the Dundas Street bridge.
Other than maintenance, the only operational cost for the fountain will be electricity to run two pumps, a tab MacPherson estimates at $20,000 a year.
The project was long-delayed -- it was one of many ventures hatched by a millennium committee of city politicians who set out in 1997 to rejuvenate the downtown as the year 2000 drew near.
About $100 million was spent on millennium projects, from street-level improvements to big-ticket items such as the John Labatt Centre and a new Central Library.
But the proposed fountain, modelled after a jet d'eau in Geneva, Switzerland, was mothballed in 2000 after the city's medical officer of health intervened.
Dr. Graham Pollett questioned the wisdom of spraying river water too contaminated to safely swim in -- pedestrians would be at risk of diarrhea, vomiting and skin infection if they breathed droplets carried by the wind from the fountain.
But Pollett retracted his objections in 2006 after the city made changes to the way the fountain would be engineered.
The original concept had been a floating fountain whose spray was more mist-like. Its replacement will be more jet-like and will spray from the bank to the centre of the forks.
"We have no objection to the current proposal," Pollett wrote following the change.
An intake pipe with a 0.6-metre diameter will extend 50 metres into the river, drawing water to the jets.
The smaller jets will run continuously while the large jet, from a pipe 30 centimetres wide, will be set to a timer, perhaps going off for five minutes every half hour.
A sensor will detect wind speed and lower the height of the jetted water to avoid mist drifting onto passersby.
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