Bluestone Dam Safety Assurance — Phase 5

Bluestone Dam has been under repair longer than some of the crews working on it have been alive. The Dam Safety Assurance program started in 1998, has run in five phases, and Phase 5 is the last of them. Brayman Construction Corporation holds the $320 million contract, with completion scheduled for January 2029. All phases together run to roughly $960 million, and a further $574 million in federal funding has been allocated to the work.

Project Scope

Bluestone is a conventional concrete gravity dam on the New River about a mile and a half upstream of Hinton, West Virginia, half a mile above the Greenbrier confluence. It’s 2,048 feet long, 165 feet high above the streambed, and built from 55 concrete monoliths. Phase 5 installs more than 1,150 high-capacity post-tensioned anchors through the spillway, the training walls, the weir and all the new concrete, socketed into bedrock at depths reported up to 220 feet below the base of the dam. They’re there to counter uplift from Bluestone Lake. The earthwork alongside is 60,000 cubic yards of rock excavation, 65,000 cubic yards of common excavation, more than 100,000 cubic yards of embankment and 90,000 cubic yards of mass concrete. That volume justified an on-site NRMCA-accredited wet batch plant with aggregate rewash and rescreening and cooling to hold mass concrete at or below 65 degrees F per USACE spec. A sheet-pile cofferdam driven down the centreline of the existing stilling basin lets the spillway be rebuilt half at a time while the dam stays in service. USACE Huntington announced completion of the right-side stilling basin on 2 March 2026, the halfway mark. Roughly 57,000 cubic yards of stilling-basin rock is being processed on site and reused as embankment. A grout curtain and reconstruction of both river banks are in scope.

Why It Matters

This is what deferred dam safety costs when the bill finally lands. The anchor work is the interesting part technically, but the delivery decision that made the job possible is the cofferdam: a working flood-control structure on the New River could not be taken out of service, so the basin gets rebuilt in halves around live operations. Brayman also did Phase 3 and the Phase 5 cofferdam, which kept specialist anchor crews on the same rock across phases. After the dam work closes out, an ADA-accessible elevated fishing pier and improved public access to both downstream banks are scheduled for around 2030.

Project Team & Details