Albeni Falls Dam Spillway Gate Replacement

Albeni Falls Dam has held back the Pend Oreille River since 1955, and every one of its 11 spillway gates is original. All 11 are coming out.

The Seattle District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers awarded a $20.4 million contract in February 2026 to Knight Construction & Supply for a gate-by-gate replacement that runs through the end of the decade. The trigger was Spillway Gate 3. Routine maintenance in April 2024 turned up defective steel, and the metallurgy traced back to the original mid-century fabrication process, which meant the problem wasn’t confined to one gate.

Project Scope

Eleven tainter gates, replaced in sequence across multiple construction seasons so the dam keeps operating through the work. The gates control Lake Pend Oreille, one of the largest lakes in the western United States, and the schedule is written around the reservoir rather than the other way around. The Corps tied the first construction season to a managed drawdown, with gradual spring refill starting April 1, 2026 and summer lake levels held between 2062.0 and 2062.5 feet as measured near Hope, Idaho. Every gate pull has to fit inside that window.

Albeni Falls does four jobs at once: flood risk management for the lower Pend Oreille and Columbia systems, hydropower through a 42.6 MW powerhouse, navigation, and recreation on a lake that carries a real summer economy. None of those functions goes offline for the rebuild.

Why It Matters

This is the unglamorous end of federal infrastructure work and it is where a lot of the money is going. The dam isn’t being expanded, relocated, or reimagined. It is being kept alive, one steel assembly at a time, because the alternative is an unplanned failure on a structure that sits upstream of a lot of people.

The Corps has also used Albeni Falls as a case study in compressed permitting for rebuilds of existing federal facilities, arguing in a June 2026 feature that replacement-in-kind work on an already-permitted structure should not carry the review burden of a new build. Whether that argument travels is a live question for every contractor bidding federal rehabilitation work over the next decade.

Project Team & Details