It was supposed to be a one-day repair that wouldn’t affect traffic on Royal Palms Parkway for more than a day. The work should be done on late. 16. Instead, the pipelines to be repaired collapsed, making the road impassable and leading to a much larger repair job that is now to cut a trench across the road to replace the pipes. This work will not start until September 27th and it will not be completed until October 11th. The work is carried out internally.
Until then, all traffic on the Royal Palms Parkway – one of the few and busiest east-west thoroughfares on the Palm Coast – will be blocked from Belle Terre Parkway to Rickenbacker Drive. But no residences are affected by the closure: no driveways in front of the Royal Palms. The pipeline in question is a series of rainwater pipes that do not interfere with the water supply to residential buildings. Even in the event of heavy rain, pumps have been installed to evacuate the water that would normally have flowed through the pipelines under the street so there is no risk of water build-up or flooding of the nearby residential property.
The infrastructure failure, however, points to a problem across the city: ITT’s infrastructure, which was built in the 1970s and 80s, is old. It’s literally rotting, in the words of Kevin Nelson, the city’s rainwater master who oversees much of this infrastructure, and collapsing in many parts of the city at the same time. This is not a new problem. The city has been trying to stay ahead of the rot since 2012 when it approved the first huge hike in rainwater charges for residents and businesses. At the time, the city was generating $ 5.3 million from this source of income, but with an annual requirement of $ 7.6 million. A 46 percent fee hike should help. It turned out it wasn’t enough: repairing pipelines like under Royal Palms wasn’t part of the plan, and other infrastructure needs arose.
In 2018, the city council approved a plan that aims to double rainwater charges from $ 11.5 in 2018 to $ 24 by 2024. This was done without controversy: the council routinely set politics aside when it came to essential and critical needs within the city. It is hard to imagine that, despite the ongoing needs, today’s council would do the same.
In 2018, pipe inspections and repairs had a modest budget of $ 525,000. The 2018 council-approved plan accelerated that to $ 2.5 million a year, with $ 2.15 million a year earmarked for pipe replacements at road junctions. Overall, the $ 75 million six-year plan includes the repair, replacement or rehabilitation of pipes, 31 major water control structures, 13 lakes, retention and retention basins and canals, and 254 miles of trenches. Just weeks ago, the city council approved a nearly $ 1 million contract to reinforce tens of thousands of feet of old gravity sewer pipes in Sections W and P. In 2019 and 2020, the city’s contractors had reinforced 60,000 feet of such pipes.
Most of these repairs are largely done outside of the public eye. Infrastructure failures rarely disturb the public. (See the full schedule, as projected in 2018, here.)
The failure of the Royal Palms Parkway is one of those cases. In an interview with FlaglerLive, Nelson explained the issues related to the outage and the upcoming repairs.
The one-day repair job was done by a company called Advance Plumbing Technology – oddly enough, the same company that had lost its W and P bid for similar work because it was “irresponsible: not meeting minimum experience requirements,” according to the Tender documents.
They carried out so-called “lining” pipes or CIPP-cured-in-place pipe lining. It’s a method that makes it possible to repair aging, cracked pipes under or between streets without digging the pipe, creating “trenches”, removing existing plumbing, or compromising the foundations of houses. It’s a lot faster too. A flexible liner filled with an epoxy-based resin mixture is inserted into the defective pipe, which is then inflated and heated with boiling water, which hardens the mixture and creates a smooth pipe. The result is a very strong structure that will add “at least 60, 70 years” to the life of the pipe, Nelson said. Take a look at a brief explanation:
Advance Plumbing workers implemented these steps into the pipe under Royal Palms. “You didn’t do anything wrong,” said Nelson. “They cleaned the pipes, and sometimes when the pipes have reached a certain level of deterioration, water can either collapse the pipes or open new holes and sediment soil into the pipe.” There are actually two 125-foot pipes, that run across the street. Both will be replaced.
“They almost made it to the end before the pipe collapsed and then started a chain reaction,” Nelson said. “The pipe collapses on itself and that immediately creates a gap in the ground.” Any pressure from above on the road, from vehicles or trucks, would cause the road to collapse to some extent. It was even visible within 24 hours of the pipelines collapsing under the road. “You can already see a dramatic dip in the road that was starting to crack,” said Nelson. So it would not have been safe to resume traffic on the road while waiting for repairs from next week.
The work is done in-house by Nelson and his crew because it’s faster and cheaper than going through the sourcing process and outsourcing the job. The job will be done for $ 54,000, Nelson said. If the job were awarded, it would cost the city “well over $ 100,000,” he said. “We took on this job as a challenge to ourselves to save tax money,” said Nelson. “We want to get the job done as quickly as possible because you have to remember that if we award this, we have to go through the same process as any contractor. It has to be written out, a contract has to be written. It only takes weeks, even in an emergency. “
The reason it couldn’t start until September 27th is because Nelson still had to order and move the building materials needed – over 200 tons of limestone road construction, 100 tons of gravel, the piping itself (nearly $ 20,000 for that alone ). “We estimate two weeks to be sure. I don’t want to make promises in case something goes wrong, ”Nelson said of the upcoming schedule. Much of the equipment, including the plumbing and road base, was in place by Wednesday. Another contractor will do the final, visible fine-tuning – the paving and streaking for around $ 3,000.
“My crew members are very talented. They know how to do it, ”said Nelson. The crew consists of Foreman Tim Lowe, Paul Bartnik, Andrew Torres, Mark Johnson and Brian Levan.
Now, “We have vehicles that ignore our barrier signs and try to get there, but this one is actually much better. This is minimal compared to the Seminole Woods closure, ”Nelson said. “Seminole Woods was a lot worse for people trying to cut themselves in and use the cut-through.”
Given the aging infrastructure across the city and the pending needs list, this may not be the last surprising inconvenience for city dwellers.
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