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Date: 2/28/2024
AGAWAM — Repairs to a drainage culvert under North Street were supposed to be completed last year. Thanks to delays in getting the materials to restore the road, Mayor Christopher Johnson now estimates it will be complete in mid-April. The section of the road near Robinson State Park will remain blocked off until then.
“It’s a very large trench,” he told the City Council on Feb. 20. “I frankly do not feel comfortable having it be temporarily filled with gravel or cold patch. It frankly is an accident that’s waiting to happen.”
The culvert repair project started last fall, Johnson said in an interview the next day. The culvert had been a problem for a while, he said, but by the time the project started, it was near collapse. Had it failed, it would have caused significant property damage in the area.
Replacing it has been a huge project, he said.
“This is a major culvert, a major excavation, significant subsurface work to fix the problems and come up with a long-term solution,” Johnson said.
However, difficulty getting materials has delayed the project’s end date. First, the machinery broke down at the plants in Vermont producing “lightweight fill,” the material that will lay over the culvert and underneath the gravel and asphalt layers of the road.
While that was happening, the asphalt production plants closed down for the winter. Johnson said plants typically do this because the weather in that season is too cold to produce the material. The town initially hoped to finish the project before the plants closed, but the issues with the lightweight fill meant they had to put it off.
The lightweight fill was expected to arrive in Agawam in late February, Johnson told the City Council. The actual completion date of the project will depend on when the asphalt plants reopen, which he expects to happen in mid- to late March. Once they do, it will take a couple weeks for contractors to fill in the gutter.
Only after the gutter is filled in will the road reopen. The mayor said he and public safety officials agree it would be unsafe to fill in the road temporarily.
Once North Street has been reopened, work will start on the culvert in May Hollow on North Westfield Street.
“The hope is to have that one be as short as possible because it will be during the longest period of the construction season,” Johnson said.