Diver brought in to help avert risk of flooding

Mass concrete stop-logs have been installed over the past two days at the Parkavara lock gates to help reduce a potential flood risk in the area.

The work has been carried out by divers and staff from Irish Sea Contractors and will essentially act as a dam to ease water level pressures downstream from the decaying lock gates.

Over recent weeks, a City Council circular had warned of flood dangers if remedial works weren’t undertaken around the location of the Parkavara lock gates.

As well as the installation of the stop-logs, Irish Sea Contractors have also carried out a detailed survey of the lock gates area following a draining and clean-up operation there on Wednesday.

This week, a spokesman for the City Council said that plans for a more permanent job to be completed on the replacement of the lock gates would be assessed in the context of the findings of the survey being carried out this week.

“We would like to stress that there isn’t any imminent danger of flooding in this area. The works were described as emergency quite simply because they weren’t contained in our scheduled programme of maintenance,” said the spokesman for the City Council.

Last month, prominent city historian, Peadar O’Dowd, warned that ‘any day now, the Parkavara lock gate is going to disintegrate’ with potential flooding consequences downstream in the Dominick Street area.

He also warned that on the other side of the coin, that if there was a drought, the main bed of the Corrib around the Salmon Weir would ‘grow daisies’.

The old timber lock gate at Parkavara could be the original one installed when the canal was constructed in the early to mid-1800s.

For more on this story, see this week’s Galway City Tribune