The major rain and flooding that hit New Canaan in August, causing property damage throughout town, also required nearly $16,000 in repair to a public park that marked its centennial this year.
Elm Street in New Canaan on Aug. 18, 2024. Mike Mauro photo
The Board of Selectmen on Tuesday approved a $15,665 contract with a New Canaan-based company that provided emergency work to address the extensive damage done to Bristow Park during the Aug. 18 storm.
“All the trails got washed out,” Public Works Director Tiger Mann told the selectmen during their regular meeting, held at Town Hall and via videoconference.
First Selectman Dionna Carlson and Selectmen Steve Karl and Amy Murphy Carroll voted 3-0 in favor of the contract with Peter Lanni Inc. The funds are available in DPW’s storm account.
Turner Hill Road on Aug. 18, 2024. Mark Kerchoff photo
Mann said: “They walked through each trail, cleaned up each trail, repaired each trail where there was damage. We had a lot of debris that clogged up a couple of the culverts. We had some stones that got washed out on one of the bridges. The main bridge where everyone was sitting, on the downstream side, a lot of that got washed out during that storm—specifically, where the trails meet. The western trails meet as you come down the hill. On that side of it, the stones blew out through there because the water came up over the bridge and then blew the stones out on the other side. So he repaired all of that back to what it was prior, to when he had finished the job originally. We walked through the entire park and said, ‘Fix this, fix this, fix this’—all the damage that had been created.”
Bristow, the nation’s third-oldest bird sanctuary, marked 100 years in 2024.
Mill Pond on Aug. 18, 2024. Theresa Clarke photo
The selectmen asked whether Lanni charges on an hourly basis (yes) and whether there’s a general rate (he charges $1,500 to $1,900 per day, depending on the crew needed for the job).
Mann said that there’s no purchase order for emergency work with Lanni, “so based upon our policy, we have to come forward for this specific work itself.”
“And given the fact that Peter Lanni’s firm had done all four phases of the work at Bristow, they were already there,” Mann said. “And then we had the situation where the centennial was actually coming up. It was very important for us to go back through and work through each trail.”