Dock Construction Underway!

By Paul Renard, Dock Oversight Coordinator

The old dock is down, and a visit there will show you a long safety fence and a pile of old lumber. We’re getting ready for the next phase of construction when our contractor, VA Class A, will bring in heavy machinery to pull the existing piles and drive new ones. In the meantime, a great deal of planning and staging is necessary to get all the materials in place at the right time. The current plan for pile driving is near the 4th of July, with substantive completion of the dock and new outdoor lighting around August 8. Afterward, some minor punch list items will likely have to be corrected (as with any large project), plus a few bureaucratic hoops to jump through are inevitable before we get Fairfax County’s final sign-off on the project.

The need for separate contractors to handle both electrical work on the new bollards and landscaping means that juggling the integrated master schedule for the project is a little complicated. VA Class A has provided the main schedule and we’ve been working to include all the other activities that will complete the full project.

In that regard, our Cluster Association has plenty of work we will do ourselves around the dock to reduce the cost of the project: re-planting some plants that we rescued from the area that will be disturbed by the dock construction; installing bio-logs along part of the shoreline near the dock to prevent erosion; and placing plants in the disturbed area near the new floating dock section and near the restored bulkhead at the other end. We will need your help and will be sending more communications with specific dates and times for community action.

Finally, as you may have noticed, we have marked off three parking spaces near Triangle Park. Once we get farther into the project, we will mark off two more for a total of five. However, and this is very important, when VA Class A brings in and removes its excavator, that entire parking lot will need to be clear for the two days on either side of those moves. We’ll give you plenty of warning, but it will be necessary NOT to ignore the cones and tape closing that lot for those time spans. We realize that this may be an inconvenience for some residents, but in a small community like Lakeport, access to the dock is extremely limited, and failure to honor the reserved spaces will significantly hinder the construction of our new dock.

If you have questions about the dock or any part of the project, or would like to volunteer in some capacity, please contact Paul Renard at prusa2000@netscape.net.