Line Street repairs coming up for bid; closure needed in summer

HATFIELD TWP >> Drivers, be warned — repairs are coming to a frequently flooded portion of Line Street, but will require closing the road for at least part of the summer to do so.

Township Engineer Bryan McAdam gave an update this week on plans to replace a culvert on Line, near where Hatfield and Montgomery townships and Lansdale all meet.

“It’s an expensive undertaking, but it is necessary,” said McAdam.

The problem spot is located on Line Street just north of Oak Drive and south of Country Lane

and the adjacent Lansdale Hospital complex, McAdam told the township commissioners on Feb. 13. In that area, two concrete water pipes meet below the roadway, and age-related deterioration has caused flooding.

“Essentially what’s going on is, there are two existing pipes that run under the road. They’re concrete pipes, there are joints where the pipe sections meet, and over the years the mortar has basically come out,” he said.

“There’s a lot of inflow in there, and there’s been, basically, settlement of the road over the course of time,” McAdam said.

Township public work staffs have fielded numerous complaints about the road conditions there in recent years, McAdam told the board, and two residents nearby have reported their homes being flooded.

“This particular system, as small as it is, is undersized. Because of the combination of those two factors: it’s undersized, and the road is failing, it made sense to go in and basically fix it,” he said.

The engineer and his firm have found that the pipes themselves can remain, but the inlets leading into them, a sanitary sewer line, and roughly 50 feet of roadway will need to be removed, upgraded, and reconnected to eliminate the flooding condition.

Doing so, McAdam said, will require closing that portion of Line Street, and the engineer has planned to do so with minimal disruption to school buses and students on that street.

“We certainly don’t want to do it during school. The way the contract is structured, the contractor will start no sooner than the last day of school,” he said.

Work to replace the culvert is projected to take roughly two months, according to the engineer, and Line Street is also on the list of roads for township Public Works staff to repave in 2019. A cost-sharing agreement with Montgomery Township has already been approved, so all that’s left is to award the bids.

“The game plan is, this gets done, and then (Public Works) has Line Street as part of their road program for 2019,” McAdam said.

“The culvert gets done, and then basically within days, or a couple of weeks, they come through, with a different contractor and throw the wearing course on top,” he said.

Doing so would provide a long-term solution for a problem spot that public works crews have tried to address with smaller spot patches in recent years.

“Basically, everything gets closed up, this gets replaced, and in theory none of us, in our lifetime, ever has to worry about this again,” McAdam said.

Bid specifications for the project have been posted, and drew a dozen contractors interested in the job, with a bid spread of $247,000 up to $472,000.

The lowest responsible bidder, Doli Construction Corporation of Chalfont, is currently being vetted, and McAdam said his firm will have a formal recommendation in place to award a contract by the commissioners’ next meeting on Feb. 27. “We are still going to do a little bit more research into them and confirm everything, but I anticipate that for the regular meeting in two weeks, we’ll be in a position to make a recommendation,” he said. The relatively early lead time is necessary because the concrete culvert inlet boxes need to be specially fabricated to fit that space, according to the engineer. “We wanted to give the contractor as much lead time as possible, to get the drawings together for that, get it to us to approve it, get it to the manufacturer, get all of that stuff together,” he said. If all goes according to plan, the project could be done by late August or early September, but Township Manager Aaron Bibro said he was less optimistic than McAdam that weather would cooperate.

“The weather won’t hold. Based on the last year, we’ve had just terrible luck,” he said.

McAdam said he had heard from residents in that area that they’ll be glad to have the flooding finally fixed, and so will Public Works Director John Wulff.

“John rightfully doesn’t want to go have to patch it every other year. Knowing that Line Street was due to be repaved, if it wasn’t fixed, it’d be throwing good money after bad,” McAdam said.

Hatfield’s commissioners next meet at 7:30 p.m. on Feb. 27 at the township administration building, 1950 School Road. For more information or meeting agendas and materials visit www.Hatfield.org.