Ongoing repairs to Reed Road will take longer than expected due to the onset of heavy, excess rain over the course of the last few weeks.
Without the ability to quickly address issues with the Daniel Street Pump Station, which is only a portion of the extent of repairs needed for Reed Road to be fully operational, other issues cannot be addressed.
“When the river is high, the groundwater is high, which adversely affects the ability to do the repairs,” engineer Darrel Martinek of W.L. Burle Engineers, P.A. explained. “When trying to find dry materials to put back in after the repairs are done, you’ve got to have dry soil to be able to compact it.”
It is unclear how long repairs to Reed Road will now take to complete.
Other issues include pavement failures west of the pump station, closer to Highway 82 as well as there being no large gravity sewer line in the area.
East of the same pump station, near Sherman’s Restaurant, material between the pipe and the road is being pulled in due to a possible failed sewer pipe, and is causing the road to fail.
Bradley Jones, project manager for W.L. Burle Engineers, P.A., said they assessed that particular sewer roughly two years ago.
“We actually ran a camera on the gravity sewer line between Pump Station 40 (Daniels Street and Reed Road) and all the way back to Main Street … it showed pipe that was put in in 1950 and that the pipe above the water line deteriorated over time,” Martinek said.
The city has a total of 104 pump stations and for the major stations, one being Pump Station 40.
While in the Daniels Street and Reed Road area, drivers may notice portable emergency bypass pumps with lights on them which indicate various things.
Deputy director of public works Ronnie Washington explained, “Those lights are there to indicate when something is going on with the left station, improper or otherwise and lets us know what we need to check.”
If a light on the pump is solid, Washington said, it is an indicator that everything is working as it should; if the lights are blinking, it indicates an issue public works needs to be aware of.
Martinek said it also depends on how the lift station is wired because some are different, seldom are two stations exactly the same.
“One light flashing could indicate the water on the wet well side is high and one light may indicate the dry well, where all the pumping equipment is, it’s high there; if the lights are off, it doesn’t have any power,” Martinek said, referring to the bypass pumps near Daniels Street and Reed Road.
The city owns some of the bypass pumps and others are rented, which can cost between $300 to $400 per day to rent, depending on the size.
Public works director Jermaine Thornton received approval on Wednesday to allow Hemphill Construction to begin work on Reed Road and Canal Street next week.
The company will start there and eventually begin work on Daniels Street and Road.
