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The water is returning to the lake in Raleigh’s Pullen Park.
Lake Howell, where ducks, geese and pedal boats normally glide, was drained last winter, so contractors for the city could replace the crumbling concrete retaining walls around the perimeter.
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Now the new concrete-block walls are finished. The 2.75-acre lake will gradually fill this week, with a mix of groundwater and water diverted from Rocky Branch, the creek that runs between the lake and Western Boulevard.
Then, after a few days at capacity, the lake will be drained again. That’s so contractors can see how the walls hold up under pressure from the water, says Gary Claiborne, who is overseeing the work for the city parks department.
“Engineers will come through just to make sure there’s no erosion or anything occurring, primarily at the bottom of the wall, and make sure there’s no shifting of the wall,” Claiborne said. “We don’t anticipate that being an issue.”
The lake will then be filled again, and new metal railings placed atop the new four-to-five-foot walls. The $2 million project should be completed by the end of September, when the walkways around the lake and to the island will reopen.
Lake Howell was built in the 1930s by the Works Progress Administration, the federal New Deal program that put people to work on roads, parks, courthouses and other public projects. It replaced a small pond that had been a fixture in Pullen since it opened in the late 1880s as the state’s first public park.
Soon after the lake was finished, it was named for Wiley Howell, who served as manager, repairman, landscaper and keeper of a small zoo at the park for 48 years until his death in 1936.
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Claiborne said the poured concrete retaining walls around the lake were decades old and cracking in many places. The concrete block system that replaces them is similar to those used for retention ponds and highway projects, he said, and the city expects it will last at least 50 years.
Before the lake was drained, contractors netted as many fish as they could — mostly sunfish, bluegill and bass, Claiborne said — and moved them to a small adjoining pond. It took two to three days to gradually let all the water out through the dam into Rocky Branch, he said, revealing a mucky lake bottom and not much else.
“I was expecting something, but no, nothing. No cars, no bodies,” he said. “At least nothing that the contractor told me about.”
The city took advantage of the empty lake to replace the underwater pipes that help regulate water flow and circulation. One thing it didn’t do was dredge the lake bottom or change its depth, as much as 10 feet in the center.
A primary goal of the lake rehab project was to be finished by the end of September. That’s because the city begins putting up lights in October for the Holiday Express, the Christmas-themed event that draws thousands to the park over more than two weeks in December.
“The important thing is we have this lake filled for Holiday Express,” Claiborne said. “That was my directive. So we had to very much stipulate that during the bidding of this project: You’ve got to be done by September.”
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