WESTFIELD – Engineers working on the Route 187 reconstruction and drainage improvement found an interesting structure, a stone culvert, which will be filled in as part of the $4.5 million road project.
Engineer Daniel McCormack of Alfred Benesch and Company (Benesch) described the route 187 project in three phases. The first phase is three-quarters of a mile long and encompasses Feeding Hills Road from Agawam to just short of the Old Feeding Hills Road intersection. Each phase is being presented separately for permit application and review.
The major improvement to that phase of the project is the addition of drainage systems. McCormack said the existing Feeding Hills Road was constructed without a drainage system and relies on sheet flow to drain water off the roadway and onto abutting properties.
The road improvement plans include four independent sections of the new closed drainage system, each section dedicated to stormwater collection in a specific section of the road, depending on topography. Three of those section involve replacing existing culverts with new facilities.
Culvert #3 carries water off an intermittent rill through the box culvert hand-constructed with native stone.
That culvert is one of two slated to be replaced with a six-by-six concrete box culvert because of concern that the stone structure has been weakened by the weight of traffic and needs to be removed. McCormack said the plan is to remove the capstone and fill in the channel, leaving the stone walls in place.
“There are concerns structurally. It’s not something you’d want to maintain (in its current condition), so it’s not feasible to keep it,” McCormack said.
The Conservation Commission, at its June 25 session, requested Conservation Coordinator Karen Leigh to contact other municipal departments to collect information on the culvert and determine if it is of historical significance.
Leigh and representatives of other departments inspected the culvert with McCormack during a July 17 site visit.
Leigh said at the July 23 commission meeting that she contacted the Department of Public Works, Water Resource Department and Historical Commission requesting any documentation related to the the structure.
“Nobody had any records of it, who built it, when it was built,” Leigh said.
City Engineer Mark Cressotti said while the structure is “interesting, it is not unique. There are other similar culverts in the city.”
The roof of one of those similar structures collapsed a couple of years ago, causing a section of roadway to drop into the culvert and posed a traffic hazard while the road was repaired.
McCormack said current plan is to construct the new box culvert near the existing culvert which will be used during construction to drain stormwater from the construction site.
The roadway will then be opened to access the stone culvert and the contractor will remove “suitable for reuse including the clapper stone roof and stone from the head walls” before the culvert channel is filled with gravel and compacted for the new roadway foundation.
Cressotti said the city “will try to find reuses for the stone” in other city projects.
