History of Aqueduct and the Shoal Lake aqueduct project.

Winnipeg Beach is a town in the Interlake Region, in the Canadian province of Manitoba.Winnipeg Beach is located at the junction of Highway 9 and Highway 229 on the southwestern shore of Lake Winnipeg, about 35 miles (56 km) north of Winnipeg

The Romans didn’t invent the aqueduct — it’s an honour which falls to the ancient Assyrians, whose engineers were well aware that water flows down hill. King Sennacherib (72 1-705 BC) ordered the world’s first recorded aqueduct and canal system to be built to supply his capital at Ninevah with water from mountain streams 16 kilometres away.

Despite the Assyrians inventing the aqueduct, the Roman Empire is now more closely associated with the gravity system used to carry water to towns and cities. Today, the remains of the towering multi-tiered arches used to span valleys and hold aqueducts aloft are viewed as marvels of Roman engineering.

In ancient Rome, 11 separate aqueducts supplied water to catch-basins where sediment was allowed to settle before the water was moved on via terracotta and lead pipes and canals to enormous cisterns located on high ground around the city. At its height, Rome claimed a population of one million, and the strength of the city’s aqueduct system was that it supplied nearly one cubic metre of water per person, an amount that would be the envy of residents of many modern cities.

The designers of the Shoal Lake aqueduct employed construction techniques that in many ways mirrored the aqueducts built by Roman engineers.

The engineers involved in the construction of the Shoal Lake aqueduct from start to finish were James H. Fuertes of New York and Greater Winnipeg Water District chief engineer W.G. Chace, but the actual horsehaped design of the aqueduct resulted from the 1913 report by engineers Fuertes, Dr. Rudolph Hering of New York and Frederick P. Stearns of Boston. The three engineers had attached blueprints of the aqueduct design to their report.

“This was not only one of the major engineering projects of its era,” said Rod McRae, the city’s commissioner of works and operations in a 75th anniversary article on the aqueduct published in the WREN on April 15, 1994. “It was, and still is, one of the longest gravity-fed covered aqueducts built in the world since the early Romans pioneered aqueduct construction more than 2,000 years ago.”

To plot the path and slope of the 156-kilometre-long Shoal Lake aqueduct, five survey crews completed 580 kilometres of transit lines, 2,100 kilometres of levels, 152 kilometres of precise levels and 3,510 metres of lake soundings to find an alignment that as nearly as possible followed the principle of a westward slope from the intake to Winnipeg, according to the article, Winnipeg’s Aqueduct in Western Canada Water magazine, fall 2008. “With downtown Winnipeg in sight, the final alignment was only about 13 kilometres longer than would be measured as the crow flies from the intake.”

The available grade for the gravity system from Shoal Lake to Winnipeg was only 90 metres, and the survey work resulted in the slope of the aqueduct being 0.57 metres every 1,000 metres.