Rosser to be restored after watermain fix

Construction work on Rosser Avenue in downtown Brandon will continue for up to a week and a half as the watermain project enters the road restoration phase, a city official says.

Six water valves were replaced over the week of Oct. 20 along Rosser Avenue, Ninth and 10th streets, and crews have since finished cutting the faulty valves, Todd Burton, the city’s general manager of operations, said on Friday.

“Next week, we will definitely complete all the work on Rosser restoration, which includes asphalt work, and the hope is to complete the side street little bits as well, but it might drag into the following week,” Burton said.

The replacement became necessary after city crews tried to turn off water for a building on a block of Ninth Street, but “the belt did not isolate,” Burton said last month. The city then tried to isolate valves on either side, but that also didn’t work.

A total of five valves were in need of immediate replacement. The sixth valve that the city and a contractor repaired — along with additional valves — were going to be inspected and potentially fixed next year, but crews decided to fix one of them this year as the project evolved, Burton said.

In an interview in mid-October, Burton said work was to wrap up on Oct. 31. He clarified on Friday that the end-of-October timeline was only for the valve repairs, but the road still needs to be restored.

“Now we’re transitioning to the restoration part of the project. So, all of the work on the lines is basically done,” he said. “There’s eight different dig sites here on these two intersections, and we have an emphasis to try to get them restored before freeze-up.”

The city completed the work on the five special valves and one regular one over a six-day period, which Burton said was right on schedule.

The work forced a few water outages for businesses in the area, none of which were more than eight hours long, he said.

The portions of Ninth and 10th streets adjacent to Rosser Avenue will continue to be closed for at least part of the work, while Rosser between Eighth and 10th streets will have one lane open, although parking along the street will still be affected.

Dave Dyck, the city’s acting manager of underground utilities, said the water outages were “fairly isolated” and “very minuscule in the big scheme of things.”

Dyck said crews worked carefully not to damage any of the other wires or pipes also running under the street.

“You’re working down in the ground, in a trench cage — it is very skilled,” he said about the work his crews do.

The tight working conditions also don’t help, Burton said.

“Your backhoe operator has to be extremely skilled to watch as they’re digging that they don’t hit something else. There’s a gas line right there. There’s the lines for the traffic lights,” Burton said.

“He’s got to navigate around that stuff and be very careful as he goes down. And then you’re working in a cage eight feet down, so you have to watch what’s going on and know what you’re doing.”

The plan is for work to be done in a way that crews won’t have to come back to the site for touch-ups in the spring, he added.

Burton said even after pulling the faulty valves out, they still don’t have a “clear picture” of what happened when things went wrong.

The city will make plans to check the other valves in the area and around the city “when the dust settles,” he said, some of which could entail how to deal with the aging infrastructure in the future.

The 10-inch-wide main line that was repaired last month was installed in 1992, but other lines in the city are older than that, he added.

» alambert@brandonsun.com