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Date: 8/1/2023
SHUTESBURY — How can the Sawmill River keep flowing under Locks Pond Road when the culvert there is being replaced? That’s one of the questions on the project that’s been ready for groundbreaking for three years and just recently got underway.
The big holdup? Moving a telephone pole.
“National Grid held us up for an entire season because it has to happen in a certain period,” said Tim Hunting, Highway Department supervisor, about the pole moving. “It has to happen from, say, July until September, when hopefully there’s not a lot of rain.”
The town secured a $500,000 grant through the state’s Small Bridge Grant Program in 2020 and tried to move ahead that summer, according to Town Administrator Rebecca Torres. The pole “right smack dab in the project zone” just off the southwest corner of Lake Wyola didn’t get moved. Torres maneuvered for nine months to get National Grid to move the pole, without success, though the town already paid for the work.
“Then they tried to double bill us in the spring, when they still hadn’t moved the pole,” Torres said. In the second summer of the project National Grid moved the pole, “but our contractor wasn’t able, at that point in time, to reschedule the project.”
The delays in moving the pole will cost the town some monies.
The project didn’t start last summer, but the pre-cast concrete pieces of the culvert were already formed and poured. The new concrete box culvert includes footings, wing walls and sections of the culvert itself that will be lowered by a crane, in sections, into place. The company wouldn’t store the culvert over the winter so the pieces had to be delivered to temporary storage behind the fire station.
“They were going to charge us over $70,000 to store it for another year,” Torres said. “Now, it’s going to be a new additional cost to move them, with all the cranes, down to the site at Lake Wyola. So there will be cost overruns.”
Money to cover the extra costs was voted at spring Town Meeting this year, but the expenditures are not yet determined. The total budget for the project is $800,000.
According to Hunting, two methods can be used to keep the Sawmill River flowing. One strategy is to dig a second channel, outside the current riverbed, that circumvents the rusted out 10 foot steel culvert being replaced. A temporary channel will harness gravity to keep the water moving through temporary piping. The other option is a pumping station, operating day and night, to keep the downstream reaches wet.
“It’s the start of the Sawmill River,” Hunting said, so “it’s gotta be dewatered. What that means is, obviously you can’t just shut the lake off and dry up the Sawmill River, so the contractor’s gotta make provisions so that the water can continue to run.”
The project located at the exit point of Lake Wyola, Hunting said, required significant environmental permitting. An unrelated problem is the closure of Locks Pond Road leaves two paths up to the center of town. Wendell Road, a winding dirt drive, frequently narrows to one lane, making motorists stop and start to let others pass. The longer route is into Leverett, up Montague Road to Shutesbury’s piece of Leverett Road, and into the town center.
The official detour up Wendell Road was quite busy on a recent Wednesday. Hunting and another town employee kept an eye on passing vehicles as they cleaned out a drainage swale.
“We’re doing drainage just to make sure that if we keep getting rain like we’ve gotten that the water will have a place to go and drain off,” Hunting said. “It’s just a narrow little country road … [so] if people can find an alternate route, other than this road, it’s a good idea.”
Torres was taking another road recently when she was surprised to come upon a gathering of National Grid employees getting ready to work. They told Torres they were starting a project to run utility poles down Locks Pond Road, past Shutesbury Elementary School and into Wendell.
“‘We have to close the road that you want to go through,” Torres told them, [and] “the only reason we’re doing it now is because you wouldn’t move a pole for us for two years.”
The National Grid employees altered their schedule. Hunting said the work for the new culvert is poised to go ahead unhindered.
“Everything’s looking pretty good now,” Hunting said. “If the weather cooperates I think it’ll go. I think it’ll go pretty well.”
The project on Locks Pond Road is expected to last about two months.