Enerdu’s Ron Campbell has sent this letter to the Town’s Chief Administrative Officer:
Please accept this letter as our continued desire for an “Exception By Council” under section 8 of the Noise By-law”.
While we appreciate your recommendation to hold meetings with the neighbours, after careful consideration and discussions with neighbours that we have a relationship with, we have decided that any such meeting will result in confrontation and have meaningless results.
The construction process is driven by two factors, spring freshet and the fish spawning windows. The winter cofferdam must be removed on or about March 15th to meet the permit requirements of both the MVCA and the MNRF.
The purpose for the request is to be at a stage of construction that will allow us to remove all of the cofferdams and access roads prior to the spring freshet. If we can achieve this, it would mean that we would not have to block the river for any further work on the powerhouse or bypass.
This would be to the mutual benefit of the Municipality’s residents and Enerdu for two main reasons:
- If we meet the milestones, once the cofferdams and access roads are removed in March, there would be no further incursions into the river on the powerhouse side to replace cofferdams. This will eliminate the possibility of any environmental issues for the river caused by replacing cofferdams and access roads.
- Construction noise will be dramatically reduced for the spring, summer and fall of 2017. If we can work extra hours until March 15th (6 weeks) when windows are closed and patio activity is low, then the amount of heavy construction will be markedly reduced during the spring, summer and fall of 2017. While work on the powerhouse will continue, the major efforts will have been completed.
The Enerdu project is well ahead of schedule. While winter work is far more expensive, we are committed to completing this project as soon as is possible. We did not enjoy disrupting the community last summer.
We will continue to work towards better placement of lights to minimize their effects and are in the process of installing back-up alarms on our equipment that sense the background noise and adjust their volumes automatically to reduce that noise impact. Further, work will be carefully scheduled to have the less noisy work occur during the evening hours.
We are willing to consider the hours of 6am to 10pm Monday through Saturday and revert to the 9am to 7pm for Sundays, if this is more palatable.
Finally, all of these plans require the cooperation of the weather. Heavy snow will slow construction down and a quick spring might result in an early freshet that would force us from the water sooner. All we can do is to provide our best efforts.
I look forward to meeting with Council to discuss this request further.
Respectfully submitted,
Ron Campbell
Enerdu Power Systems Ltd
Applicant:
Enerdu Power Systems Ltd.,
9094 Cavanagh Road,
Ashton ON K0E 1A0
