It will be a little longer than expected for Aquatera crews to install a sanitary sewer diversion on 84 Avenue between 113 Street and 116 Street. The company says poor soil conditions have pushed back the completion of the project into next year.
“The soil conditions that we’ve encountered are very hard, and the equipment wasn’t able to complete the project as designed,” says Engineering Services Manager Ralph Wohlgemuth. “We are doing another excavation partway through that initial push, and then reinstalling the equipment at that point to do a shorter section.”
While crews will continue with the installation of a manhole on the east side of 115 Street, south of 84 Avenue during the next few weeks, once that construction is completed, the work will finish up for the year. Wohlgemuth says a few weeks of construction was lost due to bad weather, and they’re still playing catch up.
“Certainly the wet spring we had and early on in summer didn’t help us; it did cause us some delays early on. We’ve had really good weather lately, and unfortunately, we lost a bit of time as we went back with the contractor to look at options to try and conclude this and figure out what was the most effective solution to getting us through to the east side of 115th this year.”
Wohlgemuth says, weather permitting, the remaining work for this year will be complete by early November.
“If we get some early snow or something like that where we cannot put down asphalt, they’ll put it in as cold mix to get through, and we’ll manage, so it can be a full-service street for the duration of the winter and then come back in the spring and put the right stuff in if we have to.”
The project was initially expected to be wrapped up by August 2020.
