PAUL, Minn. – The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, St. Paul District, will accept delivery of the first of three 47.5 ton Tainter Gates, starting Wednesday afternoon, March 16, for the Diversion Inlet Structure, or DIS, being built south of Horace, North Dakota.

The DIS is a part of the Fargo, N.D./Moorhead Metropolitan Area, Minn., flood risk management project and includes a concrete control structure with three gates to regulate flows into the project’s diversion channel.

The gate being delivered is 50 foot wide by 26 foot tall and will arrive in pieces via five semi-trucks over the course of two days. Gates two and three, also the same size, will arrive March 23/24 and March 30/31. The gates were manufactured in Bainbridge, Georgia, and Birmingham, Alabama, by Steward Machine Company and took roughly 14,000 hours to build.

The Corps of Engineers’ contractor, Ames Construction, Inc., of Burnsville, Minnesota, will offload the gate with the assistance of a 250-ton crane. It will take the rest of the construction season for the gate pieces to be assembled and installed.

B-roll footage and photos of the gate arrival will be available here late Wednesday: https://www.dvidshub.net/unit/USACE-MVP.

Additional footage and photos of the gates being made and drone footage (available late Wednesday), courtesy of the Metro Flood Diversion Authority, can be found here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1L8hJ093BEJL7hgzHnujw4pLTDUiSDAtr.

This congressionally authorized FM Area Diversion project is a 30-mile long diversion channel in North Dakota with upstream staging. It includes a 21-mile long southern embankment, 19 highway bridges, three railroad bridges, three gated control structures and two aqueduct structures. The inlet structure is one of three gated control structures.

The Corps is working in partnership on this project with the cities of Fargo and Moorhead and the Metro Flood Diversion Authority. It will provide flood risk management for more than 235,000 people and 70 square miles of infrastructure in the communities of Fargo, Moorhead, West Fargo, Horace and Harwood.