Heather Latter
It looks like motorists will be using the Fourth Street detour for at least another six weeks, as the road work taking place on King’s Highway is almost a month behind schedule.
Bay City Contractors Inc. are nearing the end of the first phase of the project (from just east of York Avenue to Webster Avenue), with all of the pipe laid for 473 metres of road.
“The concrete crew is on site today finishing off the service lines where we’ve taken out the sidewalk to put the sewer and water in,” noted Operations and Facilities manager Doug Brown yesterday, citing asphalt will be laid in the first stage next week.
And work on the second stage—from Webster Avenue to Wright Avenue—has begun, starting with the replacement of the water main and three services.
“What happened in the first stage, there was a lot more house services and they slow you down,” Brown explained.
“The second stage will go a lot better,” he assured. “There’s less pipe work in it—it’s more of a road job.”
But he stressed the water main has to be replaced.
“Remember we’re replacing stuff that’s build from 1913 to 1967,” Brown said. “You got older pipe in the ground in certain sections of that road, so we can’t leave that.
“We have to replace that and put a new road on there.”
Brown indicated he expects the work to be completed in mid-October, instead of the original Sept. 18 date.
He added there are several reasons for the delay.
“There’s been some change orders,” Brown noted. “Based on the town’s records, the information that was given to the consultant was incorrect, so there were delays because of that.”
He noted there were two days lost because of weather and the contractor was going to have two pipe crews, where he only had one.
“So that slows everything down,” Brown said, adding the geogrid (a grid that goes between the subbase and the ‘B’ gravel) takes a little bit longer to put in.
“And we didn’t really take that into account when we were developing the tender,” he admitted.
With work being focused on the second stage, Brown noted motorists need to be aware of what’s going on.
“The entrances to Subway, Tim Hortons, and Husky will change as we progress through the second stage,” he noted, adding there’s only westbound traffic allowed through that section.
“There’s signs all over the place,” he remarked. “We are trying to get everyone to get used to going westbound only through there.
“So if you come out of Tims, you can only go west or go down First Street,” Brown reiterated.
He added they’ve been doing their best to get the work down as quickly as possible.
“But you always have these few unknowns,” he said. “And the problem with this one is it’s a pretty big job and it affects a lot of the community, so we’re trying to keep it rolling.”
