September 8, 2010

ALLEN WARREN

Construction crews discovered more than they expected under one of Regina’s oldest streets.

Buried utilties pose challenge on Regina City Square project

ALLEN WARREN

correspondent

REGINA

Work on first phase of Regina’s City Square project slowed down somewhat this summer after unexpected underground discoveries knocked the downtown revitalization project off pace.

When PCL Construction Management Limited crews tore up the asphalt on the city’s downtown stretch of 12th Avenue between Scarth and Lorne Street, they found surprises that made implementation of the original design obsolete.

Foremost was the discovery of a large concrete vault owned by the provincial telecommunications company, Sasktel.

According to City Square project manager Denise Donahue, a city planner with Regina’s City Centre branch, the dimensions of the vault were bigger than expected, which interfered with the project’s road grading plans.

Furthermore, there were “generations and generations” of old phone and fibre optic lines, as well as other unexpected utility lines running underneath the city’s downtown street.

What was originally a fairly cut and dried road construction project has turned into a fully-fledged underground excavation.

“Twelfth Avenue is one of our oldest streets and underneath there we have so many utilities, and not just the current ones,” Donahue explained.

“All the utility companies came out and marked and did the things they needed to do, but we’ve found things that weren’t in their records and that didn’t show up on ours, either.”

Some abandoned lines turned out to be live.

“We’ve really had to do our due diligence,” she said.

PCL, who was awarded the $9.8 million City Square contract in April 2010, has brought in a hydrovac to pick clean the lines by cleaning out the debris that obscures them.

“We’ve been doing a lot of hydrovacing so we can see what utilities are under there before we can dig,” Donahue said.

The fibre optics cables that connect with one third of the continent’s internet connections run beneath 12th Avenue, so grading of the street surface has had to be adjusted, in order to accommodate the vault and fibre cables.

“It’s actually astounding the amount of Nortel information that runs under 12th Avenue—one false move and one third of Internet in North America could go down,” she said.

Along with the vault, the utilities themselves have proved an obstruction.

The utility lines will stay where they are and crews will work around them.

She credits the city’s chosen design firm, Winnipeg’s CohlMeyer Architecture Limited, for around-the-clock dedication to the constant demands of the project.

“Every time we hit something we’re not expecting, they run back to their office and redesign that architectural feature they were working at and hand the plans back to PCL,” she said.

“At the start, these surprises were really throwing us off, but we’ve adapted and it’s become a much smoother running machine now between everybody.”

Donahue, as well as PCL’s project manager and the design firm meet weekly to address new challenges and to discuss progress.

Once the entire City Square project wraps up in spring 2011, Regina will have a new, redesigned downtown 12th Avenue that will curve artfully into the north part of the city’s downtown Victoria Park. It will accommodate an open-air plaza that will feature a stage and a fountain.

It will be closed to traffic for special events.

Of the $9.8 million budgeted for the project, $4.3 million is coming from the federal and provincial governments, but none of it is stimulus fund cash.

Some of the remaining $5.5 million will be paid for by Regina taxpayers, but the bulk will come from local developers in the form of Service Agreement Fees (SAF).

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