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  • May

    Dam safety team for Pittsburgh District

    Headwaters Highlights: Dam Safety Team Conducts Regular ‘Doctor Visits’ to Prevent Flooding Disasters

    The Pittsburgh District dam safety team develops and maintains emergency action plans and works with emergency managers and first responders to ensure communities are safe from potential dam risks or failures.
  • Bluebird volunteer

    Headwaters Highlights: Volunteer edition at Woodcock Creek Lake

    In 2004, due to the USACE volunteer program, Mark Ritke installed a dozen bluebird boxes at Woodcock Creek Lake, which fledge more than 50 bluebirds yearly. Because Mark monitors his bluebird boxes regularly throughout the nesting season and uses predator guards, he has a nearly 100 percent fledgling success rate.
  • Youghiogheny Special Recreation Day

    Headwaters Highlights: Youghiogheny River Lake team wins national partnership award

    From patrolling the waters during the annual Fourth of July boat night parade to installing fish habitats alongside Boy Scout groups, park rangers and staff at the Youghiogheny River Lake are constantly working with partners, volunteers, and state agencies to improve recreational opportunities for the public.
  • Special recreation day

    Annual community recreation day makes Youghiogheny River Lake special

    Busloads of people arrived at Youghiogheny River Lake and soon the park was filled with kids running around, games and dancing to music in the outdoors.

  • Army Corps of Engineers reminds visitors to practice water safety

    WASHINGTON, D.C. – As millions of Americans plan visits to our nation’s lakes and rivers, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers reminds visitors of the importance of practicing safe, sensible, and thoughtful activities in, on, and around open water.
  • An aerial view of a lock along the Ohio River.

    Headwaters Highlights: New Cumberland Locks and Dam

    If the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers completed New Cumberland Locks and Dam in 1839 instead of 1961, it might have been called Vernon Locks and Dams or Cuppytown Locks and Dam, named after John Cuppy, who designed the town and named it Vernon. Instead, the earliest land buyers in Vernon requested Cuppy to name the town after Cumberland, Maryland – and a town was born. But, more importantly, a lock and dam found its name.
  • Kennywood visible from Braddock

    Headwaters Highlight: Braddock Locks and Dam sandwiched between two Pittsburgh icons

    There is only one locking facility on the river located between a steel manufacturer and the iconic Pittsburgh theme park, Kennywood, forming the perfect metaphoric sandwich of the city it serves.

  • April

    Steve Fritz, the Mega Projects program manager for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Pittsburgh District, briefs members of the Inland Waterways Users Board while on a tour of the Monongahela River Locks and Dam 4 at Charleroi, Pennsylvania, April 12, 2023. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Pittsburgh District hosted the tour and several briefings about ongoing and future inland navigation construction projects within the district. During the tour, Inland Waterways User Board (IWUB) members learned about the overall Lower Monongahela River navigation project and the new river chamber construction at Charleroi, which is in its final phase after nearly 20 years of construction. Members also listened to briefings about the overall Upper Ohio navigation project and its first major construction contract, the new Montgomery lock construction. IWUB is an industry federal-advisory committee representing all fuel-taxed inland waterway systems within the United States. The navigation industry contributes to the Inland Waterways Trust Fund through fuel taxes paid by carriers who transport bulk commodities on the inland waterway system. The board makes recommendations to Congress and the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil Works on how best to invest federal and trust funds dollars to keep the most cost-effective, environmentally friendly, and safest form of transportation for bulk commodities resilient and reliable. (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Pittsburgh District photo by Michel Sauret)

    Leaders in riverway commercial traffic visit Mega Project construction in Pittsburgh

    Industry experts, inland navigation stakeholders, government officials and more stepped off the bus and walked over to a welcome station where they donned life jackets and hard hats. Most members, stakeholders, and government officials already knew one another, but some shook hands as leaders in the shipping industry introduced themselves to federal employees and military officers from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
  • Carl Nim, a biologist with U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Pittsburgh District’s Water Quality team, collects a water sample from the outflow at Kinzua Dam in Warren, Pennsylvania, March 30, 2023. The district’s Water Quality team collected water samples from the Allegheny River both before and after the spring pulse to compare the pulse’s effect along various points on the river. The collected samples are sent to the Corps of Engineers Research and Development Center to test and analyze myriad factors such as pH acidity, alkalinity, metals, nutrients, and conductivity. (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Pittsburgh District photo by Andrew Byrne)

    Pittsburgh District’s Water Quality team conducts first “spring pulse”

    Millions of gallons of water rushed out of the Kinzua Dam every minute for eight hours straight into the Allegheny River. The outflow caused the Allegheny River to rise by almost two feet. The water pushed out of the dam with massive force, resembling giant firehoses opened to full blast. This water release event was seven years in the making, a perfect storm of conditions that allowed water quality experts to replicate a spring pulse.
  • Rangers and maintenance workers work together to help create beautiful and safe public lands in the Pittsburgh District.

    Pittsburgh District lakes and dams prepare for recreation season

    Park rangers across the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Pittsburgh District have been preparing for the upcoming recreation season throughout the winter months. "Recreation season provides us a platform to get out and do what we signed up to do. Park rangers love being outdoors and working with the public. This is the time when we can allow our imaginations to run wild by coming up with different interpretive programs and events to connect with the visiting public," Alex Stevenson, northern area park ranger.

  • March

    Brent Kelly, a maintenance mechanic, prepares a lifting beam to lift a new gate hoist during its installation in the control tower at the Crooked Creek Dam in Ford City, Pennsylvania, Feb. 14, 2023. BCI Construction installed four new hoists – each weighing 38,000 pounds apiece and control the dam’s gates – at Crooked Creek Lake to modernize the facility’s machinery and improve usage. The new hoists make the machinery safer and more efficient to use, with digital displays that are more accurate and easier to read. The original hoists were in operation since the dam was built in 1938. (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers photo by Andrew Byrne)

    New hoists at Crooked Creek Lake offer flood protection for the next 75 years

    They may just look like large hunks of metal, but the new hoists installed at Crooked Creek Lake will go hard at work to reduce the risk of floods in the greater Pittsburgh region for the next 75 years or longer. The hoists – weighing 38,000 pounds apiece – work to lift reservoir gates to control the lake’s water level and mitigate flooding downstream. Flood mitigation is one of the Corps of Engineers’ primary missions, and Crooked Creek Dam has helped prevent flooding for both the local community and downtown Pittsburgh since the dam’s construction in 1938.
  • Many Boy Scouts who volunteered to help with the project are avid anglers passionate about helping wildlife. Their service work at Youghiogheny will also help them earn their fish and wildlife management badges. In addition, their volunteer hours will also count towards their community service goals and help them increase in rank.

    Local Boy Scout troops help assemble fish habitats at Youghiogheny River Lake

    They may look like large, spiky wheels for medieval torture machinery, but mossback habitats provide life to fisheries and offer broad benefits to lake ecosystems.

  • February

    Michelle Baldridge owns the patent for the Petite Gato

    Army Corps of Engineers employee thinks big by patenting petite wagon creation

    As she walked into the manufacturing warehouse to check up on her invention, Michelle Baldridge entered a place that resembled more of a wonderland from various worlds than a sterile lab where robotic arms might assemble pieces of new technology in secret.
  • Portrait of various engineers to celebrate National Engineers Week.

    National Engineers Week: Creating the Future

    The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Pittsburgh District celebrates National Engineers Week by featuring some of our own engineers who specialize in a range of disciplines, from civil design to hydraulics.
  • Pittsburgh District hosts training to provide emergency power during natural disasters

    Pittsburgh emergency team leads national response to restore emergency power across US

    No matter what kind of or where a natural disaster might strike in the United States if a community loses electricity in a crisis, there is only one district within the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers tasked by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to coordinate emergency power.

  • January

    A 3D model view of Montgomery Locks and Dam improvements

    Underwater wall construction serves as a stepping stone for major navigation construction project on Ohio River

    Imagine a retaining wall made of columns built into the bedrock of the Ohio River. The wall is only 50 feet long, but it pierces 25 to 40 feet into the ground -- completely underwater.
  • Ceremony signing for public partnership agreement.

    Pittsburgh’s got grit, but Army Corps signs partnership agreement to help filter out the muck

    To combat the grit problem in the sewer systems, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Pittsburgh District signed a partnership agreement with the Allegheny County Sanitary Authority (ALCOSAN), which will construct a grit chamber along Spring Garden Run, a neighborhood located in the northern area of Pittsburgh.

  • December

    George Brkovich drives a boat and locks through a Lock and Dam.

    After 40 years on the water, a change of course

    After 40 combined years of federal service in the U.S. Coast Guard and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, George Brkovich is retiring.
  • An illustrated page of Larry the Lock for children's book.

    Larry the Lock

    "Larry the Lock" is an illustrated children's book produced by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Pittsburgh District to educate the public about the locks and dams on the rivers and the important mission they serve to support navigation around the Pittsburgh Region and beyond. (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers illustration by Ashley Daugherty)

  • November

    A contractor loads a temporary emergency generator onto a truck at the La Colonia II assisted living facility in Cape Coral, Florida. When a disaster occurs, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) declares an emergency, coordinates with the district to deploy teams to impacted areas, and sends temporary emergency generators for deployed teams to set up. The generators are temporarily put in place to restore power to critical infrastructure such as hospitals, water supply centers and assisted living facilities. The generators are removed after primary generators or the main power supply is restored. (U.S. Army courtesy photo by Tulsa District)

    Pittsburgh District provides power team to hurricanes Ian and Fiona relief effort

    Imagine everything in your house – furniture, family heirlooms – floating away in a flood. Then imagine your house floating away in it, too. To call it ‘bleak’ is an understatement. However, that is the terror many experienced in September when hurricanes Ian and Fiona devastated Puerto Rico and the southeastern corner of the United States.