Marquette waits for results of ore dock inspections

The City of Marquette is waiting for results to come back from structural inspections that have just been done on the old ore dock in the city’s Lower Harbor.

The Marquette City Commission set aside money in the budget for this fiscal year to perform the inspections. The field work involved both a dive team examining what’s underwater and a structural engineering team looking at what’s above the surface.

“The ore dock itself is a concrete superstructure,” Marquette city engineer Keith Whittington said. “It’s actually sitting on wood pilings, so the diving team actually did go down there and take some core samples to make sure everything was looking OK as far as the integrity of it.”

The city wants specific information about the ore dock’s condition. It would then have a better idea of what would be needed to either repair the structure or to put it to some other future use.

“They’ve got the field work done now,” Whittington said. “Now they’re going to go take that back to the office and start doing their structural analysis. This is supposed to be complete by September, so we’ll have something, probably, by the end of September.”

The Lower Harbor ore dock was built in 1931 and remained in use until 1971. The city took it over in the 1980s.