The Board of Selectmen at its most recent meeting approved a $166,674 contract with a Tappan, N.Y.-based company to reline an 83-year-old stretch of sewer line on South Avenue.
The aging sanitary sewer line runs for about 3,300 feet, according to Maria Coplit, town engineer with the Department of Public Works.
“Records indicate that this eight-inch sewer main along this section of South Avenue between Bank Street and Farm Road dates back to 1942,” Coplit told the selectmen at their Aug. 19 meeting, held at Town Hall and via videoconference.
She continued: “With the Aquarion water company’s Southwest Regional Pipeline Project to construct the new 36-inch water transmission line within South Avenue in such close proximity to our existing sewer main, it is prudent to reline this section of the sewer main, given both the proposed deep excavation required for the water main installation and the physical installation of the water main itself. The relining of the existing sanitary sewer main will help to ensure its structural integrity and also delay the need for future repairs in such close proximity to the new water main. Aquarion has agreed to fund this work as a 100% reimbursement.”
First Selectman Dionna Carlson and Selectmen Steve Karl and Amy Murphy Carroll voted 3-0 in favor of the contract with Insituform Technologies LLC.
The company has “successfully completed several sewer realigning projects in town, and we’ve been very satisfied with their work,” Coplit said. The job will involve cleaning, CCTV inspection, installation of cured-in-place lining and traffic control, she said.
The selectmen asked how long the work would take (about one week), whether Aquarion will also pay for traffic control (yes), whether the new 36-inch main is being installed alongside the existing line (yes) and whether there will be a service disruption for residents (no).
Coplit said that much of the existing main “is down the center of the road” on South, while other sections are “off to the side.” A similar pipe relining on Cross Street saw the town keep the road open in both directions with traffic control, she said.
Karl praised Public Works Director Tiger Mann for recognizing, amid the larger and disruptive 36-inch installation project, that “there was a danger to not do this work.”
Karl continued: “And if they [Aquarion] were going to be in there, excavating down there, there was a real strong possibility that something could happen. So this is really a lot to do with recognizing that that was a danger and Tiger stepping up and saying, ‘Hey, if you’re going to do this, we want you to guarantee that this isn’t going to happen.’ That’s where that 100 percent [reimbursement] came in. It’s a big deal that he was able to do that.”
New Canaan residents might not recognize how important it is that Tiger Mann runs our public works. Here’s another example. Thank you, Tiger.
There have been a lot of great road improvements done this summer. Unfortunately, the sidewalk installation on Millport resulted in several trenches being dug across that newly repaved road that were insufficiently repaired. It is unclear that the patch job done by the water company on South Ave is done for the year with the work, but it is also very shoddy. I thought we learned the lesson about holding the utility contractors accountable when the gas line work left the roads in miserable condition for several years.
With a deep dig, this is also a great opportunity to get the electric lines and cable lines underground. What a great opportunity to harden our infrastructure, even if its just for 3300 ft.
Be great if they could consider installing a conduit that will enable the town to someday bury the unsightly power lines that blight the otherwise idyllic main thoroughfare in to town. They have been there for 120 years…
This is a great idea
I second that emotion.
we all agree — but what you don’t know is this
The power lines are not owned by the power company
Frontier (old AT&T ) owns them and get this the power co pays them for using the lines and so does the cable co — how much is not known to the public
We have 120 miles of roads it was said it would cost a million dollars a mile to bury them = 120 million which seem really off considering the gas lines
seem to cost less and seem to really move along
Even if you did 20 miles a yrs it would only take 6 yrs
So if we did bury them in our roads we would be paid by the power co
and the cable co for use our roads to carry their lines on an ongoing basis
Now I have talked to an Eversource linemen who says underground power lines are sometimes compromised by water, but would that be a big problem
we have problems with the overhead lines all the time
some are so unsightly like at God’s Acre
The issue will not come up again until the next hurricane hits us like Sandy when we had 1,000+trees down and my power was out for 11 days
Eversource gets to pass on their transmission and delivery costs (which includes maintaining the lines) to their customers. They are also given a profit margin on those costs by the regulators. So, the higher the costs for maintaining the grid, the more money they make. That’s the incentive they have for not making the upfront investment to bury the lines since over time the profits made on all the tree trimming, pole replacing, rehanging the wires etc. would drop significantly.