SANDPOINT — The level of Lake Pend Oreille is expected to stay a little bit higher than normal next month to accommodate BNSF Railway’s work on its bridge across the lake, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The lake level is forecast to be between 2,062 feet and 2,062.5 feet through Sept. 21, Joel Fenolio, Upper Columbia senior water manager for the corps, said during a lake operations meeting on Thursday. The lake will remain above 2,061.5 through Sept. 25 and drop down to 2,061 by Sept. 30.

“They’ll have a barge in the water and they needed some guarantees of flows so we won’t be drafting quite as much as we have in the last couple of Septembers,” Fenolio said.

In the meantime, waterfront landowners on the lake and river upstream of Albeni Falls Dam may see slight fluctuations this month so the corps can conduct a seismic safety review in the dam’s spillway.

Flows at the dam will be reduced to about 5,000 cubic feet per second so holes can be bored into the dam’s spillway.

“We’re testing the interface between the actual concrete and the bedrock,” said Fenolio. “We’re making sure we have a good seal between the concrete and the bedrock.”

The seismic safety review was recommended following periodic assessments of the dam.

Currently, the dam is running at about 7,000 cfs.

Starting Monday, the flows will be reduced between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. each day. Flows will increase overnight before being reduced again the following day.

Fenolio said the fluctuations for the seismic review will be slight.

“It might be a couple of inches, but it’s going to be well within the normal operating range that we have during the summer,” he said.

Corps spokesman A. Scott Lawrence said residents upstream won’t be significantly impacted.

“For the lake, it’s not really going to have much of an impact. The impact is downstream,” said Lawrence.

The corps expects to have the lake level down 2,053-2,054 feet by the end of October. The lake is forecast to be within a half a foot of its 2,051-foot winter pool elevation by Nov. 15.