WESTFIELD – The Arch Road stormwater drainage improvement project continues to be a challenge as the work nears completion.
City Engineer Mark Cressotti said Friday that the project is “getting pretty close” to being completed, but there are new challenges for the contractors.
The project has been plagued by improperly marked subsurface utilities which resulted in several incidents in which an asbestos-concrete water transmission line was damaged. Currently the Westfield Gas & Electric Department is working to correct a problem with a gas line. Those problems have delayed the completion of the work to install a larger storm drain pipe.
The Board of Public Works issued the stormwater contract in March to a city firm, JL Raymaakers of 1100 East Mountain Road in Westfield, which submitted the low bid of $684,745 for the project. The project was designed to replace drainage lines and realign the road to reduce the present curve and straighten out the heavily traveled roadway.
The project is intended to correct the drainage problem created when the state and city revamped the Massachusetts Turnpike access, creating the jug handle system that motorists, northbound on North Elm Street (Clay Hill), now use to enter the Massachusetts Turnpike.
City officials and consulting engineers investigated and discovered that the jug handle drainage was about twice the circumference of the Arch Road drainage line which could not accept the volume of stormwater being delivered by the jug handle storm water system.
“We had hoped to be done before the opening of school, but that has not happened,” Cressotti said.
The contractor still has to remove the temporary trench patch and replace it with a six-inch permanent patch, then repave the entire construction area.
“The (runway paving) work at the (Barnes Regional ) Airport is making scheduling for paving the road difficult,” Cressotti said, “but it is looking like it could be done in two weeks.”
Cressotti said that the Prospect Street Bridge project, a state Department of Transportation project, is “making progress.”
“The contractor is encouraged by how things are going,” Cressotti said. “The official timeline is that the bridge will be open by next spring, but there is the possibility that it could open sooner, as early as the beginning of the (2014) year.”
That project scope includes demolition of the former Pochassic Road Bridge and construction of a new span. A temporary pedestrian bridge, over the railroad tracks down to Old Pochassic Road in front of Tierney Insurance at the old depot, has already been completed.
The contractor is required to preserve the arch section of the existing bridge, a requirement the Massachusetts Historical Commission because of its architectural significance. The arch has been reinforced with beams during the demolition and new bridge construction.
The state Department of Transportation awarded the $2.6 million project to R. Bates & Sons, Inc., of Clinton.
Replacement of the Pochassic Street Bridge was originally part of the Great River Bridge project, which included construction of a second span, rehabilitation of the existing bridge and reconstruction of the railroad bridge to raise that structure to create clearance for trucks.
The Pochassic Bridge project was pulled from the scope of the Great River project because of costs and impacts on construction schedules. The Pochassic Street Bridge replacement was estimated at nearly double the contract awarded to Bates.
