Heather Wright/The Independent

It is a moment Amanda Pepping – and a lot of people at Town Hall in Petrolia – have been waiting for.

Pepping is a senior project manager at CIMA+ in charge of the $16 million replacement of the water intake at Petrolia’s historic – and still active – water treatment plant in Bright’s Grove. The moment is the day when the giant pipeline which will draw water from Lake Huron for Petrolia users is placed at the bottom of the lake.

Pepping says the over 700 meters of pipeline was expected to be placed by barges and divers this week, however the weather didn’t cooperate. She, and everyone else who has been watching the project with interest, will have to wait seven more days.

“With work like this, you want the lake to be pretty calm. So we’re actually hoping to go ahead this week, but the marine people said the winds are shifting and the wave conditions won’t be favourable, so we’re going to try again next week.

Pepping says it will be quite a job to replace the 80-old-system.

The pipeline will come in two pieces by barge. “Each one is roughly 180 metres in length, 190 metres in length, and so they’re being assembled off-site, actually down at Sarnia Docks, and then they’re going to be actually floated in two pieces over to in front of where the treatment plant property is.

“It’s going to be done in two separate sections on two separate days, Pepping tells The Independent.

The first day the first piece of pipe will be lined up with the treatment plant and connected to an existing pipe, on land, in front of the plant. “Then they will fill the pipe with water, and it will sink down into the lake,” she says.

The second length of pipe will come the next day. Divers will help connect the two pipes with a fitting underwater.

Then, the workers sink it into place. After that, the pipeline will be covered dirt.

“Everybody’s really excited to see, and it’s a very interesting type of construction method – it’s not something that you see every day, even working at an engineering firm.”

Pepping says people on the shoreline will be able to see some of the process. The town has also set up a camera using time-lapse photography to capture the entire building process.

CIMA+ is also planning to use drone footage and still photography to capture what is a fairly rare replacement of municipal infrastructure.

Once the pipeline is laid, there will still be several months of work to complete the project.