A detour around an lengthy Lansdowne sewer construction project will continue to remain for a couple of extra weeks than initially planned.
“Due to unforeseen circumstances related to water servicing, the city centre sanitary upgrades project stage four detour is being extended to Oct. 20,” says Infrastructure Delivery Divisional Manager Matt Kachel.
During this time, the 500-block of Lansdowne Street will remain closed to motorists.
“We’re a little bit behind. We encountered a bit of issues with the water mains that we needed to cross around the area going into 4th Avenue, into Lansdown. So it took us a bit more time to get through that.”
“The Sanitary pipe in that area is also at one of the deepest points, so we’re five meters down and so there’s quite a bit of things in the way. We try to inspect the hydrovac and try to locate the utilities as best we can, but until we actually excavate and see where everything is, we’re going a little blind.”
“So the good news is we’ve got everything going back together really, really well. It’s just taking us a bit more time to get through that. We still are generally on schedule. I actually hoped that we would be done two weeks early, but it looks like we’re gonna end up needing those two weeks back. So we did have some float in our schedule, but I just didn’t expect it that it was gonna happen here, but that’s what we planned for.”
The sewer upgrade project has been ongoing since the end of April, and over the past number of months, work has moved gradually east along Lansdowne. The 500-block of Lansdowne Street was first closed to traffic on Sept. 23.
Lansdowne Street traffic is being detoured south on 6th Avenue to St. Paul Street, westbound on St. Paul Street to 3rd Avenue, and northbound on 3rd Avenue to Lansdowne Street.
“So we’ve got a couple more we’ve got a couple more weeks of having things blocked off there. After that, we should
be able to open it up and then move over onto stage five, which is the last part, which is going to go past the RADIO NL building there and work its way to just behind Memorial Arena. And that’s the end of the project… nobody’s going to have to deal with us next year which is. I’m sure everyone be thrilled with.”
“We appreciate everybody’s patience here,” says Kachel. “We really pushed hard to get this done this year so that we weren’t coming back and having disruption across two years, because we recognize how difficult and challenging this was for businesses and commuters throughout the area.”
Stage five, the final stage of the project, will commence in mid-October and will involve the full closure of Lansdowne Street from 6th Avenue to 8th Avenue.
