{"id":89761,"date":"2020-03-27T18:33:15","date_gmt":"2020-03-28T00:33:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/city-of-durango-completes-work-above-whitewater-park\/"},"modified":"2026-03-31T11:09:20","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T11:09:20","slug":"city-of-durango-completes-work-above-whitewater-park","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/city-of-durango-completes-work-above-whitewater-park\/","title":{"rendered":"City of Durango completes work above Whitewater Park"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"The
The city of Durango has completed work to fix dangerous rapids in the Whitewater Park.<\/span>Jerry McBride\/Durango Herald<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

The city of Durango has completed work on the Whitewater Park intended to fix dangerous human-made rapids, and now it\u2019s time to see what high water brings during spring runoff.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s kind of the game with all of this,\u201d said Jarrod Biggs, assistant utilities director. \u201cWe execute the plan, and then we have to watch what Mother Nature does for us, or to us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tweaks have been made to the Whitewater Park, which flows along Santa Rita Park, as early as the 1980s. But a full-scale $2.6 million project to enhance the park and build a series of rapids began in 2014 and was finished in 2018.<\/p>\n

In summer 2016, the city\u2019s Utilities Department spent $1 million on a separate project just upstream of the Whitewater Park to build several new features to divert more water into the city\u2019s water intake for municipal use.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s these features some people in the boating community say pose too great a risk for running<\/a> the Animas River at high water.<\/p>\n

\"The
The city of Durango has completed work to fix dangerous rapids in the Whitewater Park.<\/span>Jerry McBride\/Durango Herald<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

In early March, the city started an estimated $113,000 project<\/a> to make the rapid safer, work that was recently completed, Biggs said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it went pretty well,\u201d he said. \u201cNow, it\u2019s just a matter of watching how it reacts to high water.\u201d<\/p>\n

The city has said a permanent solution, which would grout the bottom of the river to hold the boulders in place, has been rejected by the Army Corps of Engineers and Colorado Parks, citing concerns to wildlife.<\/p>\n

As a result, it\u2019s likely the city will have to get in the river every few years to tweak the features so they remain safe.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt the end of the day, we\u2019re trying to serve two functions,\u201d Biggs said. \u201cOne: make sure water gets into the intake. Two: make sure its passable. And there can be significant tension between those two goals, but we\u2019re hopeful we found a happy medium.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"The
The city of Durango has completed work to fix dangerous rapids in the Whitewater Park.<\/span>Jerry McBride\/Durango Herald<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"This
This photo from 2018 shows the last time changes were made in the Animas River Whitewater Park.<\/span>Jerry McBride\/Durango Herald file<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

jromeo@durangoherald.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dangerous rapid prompts improvement project<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":89764,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[304,507,3735,1799,3734],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-89761","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-animas-river","tag-durango-city-officials","tag-durango-whitewater-park","tag-rafting","tag-whitewater"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89761","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=89761"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89761\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":89762,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89761\/revisions\/89762"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/89764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89761"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=89761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}