Rained out

The Pine Haven Town Council met for a special meeting last Wednesday afternoon to accept a two-week stay of work from Sacrison Paving to allow the ground to dry from the repeated showers that have prevailed this summer.

For the last month and a half, Sacrison has been repairing damage to the paved streets of Pendleton, Lakeview and Vista Grande Drives as well as raising the depth of the paving material another two inches to provide a more sustainable hard top. However, due to the unusually high rainfall this summer, the 35 day completion schedule is suffering as Wednesday made 37 days and they still have a couple of days work on these streets.

Originally, the project was set up with a fairly aggressive schedule; 30 working days to substantial completion of the paving and 35 to finish up the manhole adjustments and clean up the dirt work.

“But, said Sacrison’s Chris Booth, “there has been a significant amount of additional repairs needed that we didn’t foresee.”

Town engineer HDR’s Mike Oakley explained to the council that Sacrison has already incurred added costs because of the wet conditions:

“With all the rain we’ve had, regular traffic and construction traffic are causing some damage. This damage obviously adds cost to the project because we have to repair it before we can do the overlay.” He added that this issue, “also stops the paving process”.

Booth told the audience that the contractor has “been fighting this from the start”; some days not attending the site at all just to allow it time to dry. The ground is so wet that the crew is “paving for one day and patching for three to five.”

He told the body candidly, “It’s just spending a lot of your money and a lot of my time.” He admitted that the machinery used to lay the paving material is actually increasing the damage to the roads, too.

Booth expressed his frustration, “I’m not trying to put anything off, I want to do it right and not spend all the money on patching. We might wait two weeks and still fight it like we have been, but I’d rather do that now rather than get to the end and it doesn’t turn out and then we’re back here again.”

To this end, he suggested giving the ground a couple of weeks to thoroughly dry, allowing the roads to be completed without further damage.

Booth reported that Lakeview, the most completed aspect of the project, “looks good” because the crew was able to finish the paving without “driving on the edges” and Vista Grande may not be as difficult “because the trucks can back down as we go and not drive along side all the time”. He did note, though, that they had already been patching a few of their own damages while working along that street. Pendleton, though, is narrower and the trucks are tearing the siding from the road as they lay the paving. Oakley clarified that the contractor is only a couple of days short of completion on both Pendleton and Vista Grande.

Mayor Bill Cunningham requested some kind of tentative time frame for the contractor’s return to work and Booth allowed that they can return during the week of August 5 to evaluate the situation with the engineers and if the area has dried, continue toward completion. Booth agreed with public works director Sunny Schell’s suggestion that they work on setting up the manholes on Lakeview while they wait.

With all parties in agreement, the governing body approved extending the project time for a time of the engineers’ discretion.