St. Marys council awards nearly $600,000 contract for urgent culvert replacement

Project could close portion of Queen Street West for 10 days or more

By Galen Simmons, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

St. Marys council has awarded a nearly $600,000 contract for the urgent replacement of a failing culvert under Queen Street West to Nichols Excavating Inc.

At council’s regular meeting Oct. 28, town public works director Jed Kelly presented the results of a tender for the replacement of the Bolton drain culvert under Queen Street West after it was found to be failing and undersized by the town’s drainage engineer in the summer. With six bids submitted ranging as high as just under $1 million, council voted to award the project to Nichols Excavating, the low bidder, at a cost of $597,935 – just below the roughly $602,500 budgeted for the project when the failing culvert was discovered in July.

“There’s a culvert on Queen Street West near the Beer Store,” Kelly said. “The culvert is failing; it’s in critical need of replacement. We are monitoring it, but we would like to proceed with the replacement immediately. If council approves the award tonight, we’ll have to start working backwards through the project schedule. We would obviously order the pre-cast tomorrow, engage the contractor and then start working out a construction schedule.

“The plan is to have a 20-day construction window – so in and out in 20 days. Once we get awarded and we have a construction schedule, (infrastructure services manager) Jeff (Wolfe) wanted to engage the contractor to see if we could limit the (full road) closure to half that. We would have one lane (of traffic) for 10 days, and then there would be a section due to the watermain replacement and the hydro and the cranes where we would have to have a complete closure for probably 10 days. We don’t know those details 100 per cent until we have a contractor engaged and have a conversation.”

Since the existing culvert – installed in the 1980s to replace a larger, failing culvert – was found to be undersized, the replacement culvert will be a larger concrete-box culvert. The work involves the lowering of a section of watermain under the structure and the relocation of an existing hydro pole owned by Festival Hydro. Residents on Queen Street West, west of the culvert, will have a day without water as the new watermain is connected, as well as up to eight hours without hydro as the new pole is installed further away from the culvert.

With that section of road fully closed for anywhere from 10 days to four weeks, traffic will need to be detoured north on Perth Road 163 to Perth Line 10 and Perth Line 14 to the north end of St. Marys, or around Perth Line 5 to Thomas Street.

“If we have traffic getting around it in different ways … we may be subject to some complaints from Thomas Street … because they’ve gotten used to it being quiet down there,” Mayor Al Strathdee said. “The logical thing if I was even a school bus or something is I would probably prefer to go that route as opposed to all the way around the other route (to the north end of town), and I just want to make sure that A, we can do it, and B, we don’t create traffic problems with heavy trucks or people that are trying to get around. … A few delivery routes in St. Marys might end up going that way.”

“Once we have (the contract) awarded, we can start the planning phase,” Kelly responded. “We anticipate there’s probably a three-week window on the pre-cast … so we’ll have to start working through those details, start banging on doors and talking to known truck recipients and things like that in the area.”

With the timing of the project expected to begin in mid-November and be completed by mid-December, Coun. Dave Lucas underscored the need for construction to start and finish on time so it doesn’t get delayed by winter weather and colder conditions.

“I’d be really concerned if we have a contractor that doesn’t show up (on time),” Lucas said.

“I certainly share that sentiment,” Kelly responded. “I also start to twitch when the leaves drop and we’re starting to put excavators on roads. I’m not the oldest, but I have been around long enough to know this is a bad idea. I think we should stress that if this pipe fails, the road could be closed for months, so we don’t really want to do it, but this is as soon as we could do it. As far as we know, the contractor is keen to get going; he thinks he can adhere to the schedule and there’s no red flags from our engineer. Absolutely, this will be a push and we’ll take those sentiments to the contractor.”

Back in July, Wolfe told councillors that a heavy rain or thaw could cause erosion around the current culvert pipe, causing it to fail. If it does fail, Wolfe said a months-long road closure on Queen Street West would severely limit the interconnectedness of St. Marys’ road network and have a big impact on drivers.