The closed portion of Poundmaker Road should be reopened soon as construction wraps up on a water supply main installation.
“I’m thinking within the next week to two weeks the road should be reopened,” said Larry Galye, the senior project manager with the City of St. Albert. Poundmaker Road was shut between the St. Albert Cemetery and Sturgeon Road. Work on installing the water line started in July.
The project is the final phase of the East St. Albert Water Supply Main, connecting a dedicated water supply line to the Oakmont Reservoir from the Epcor line near 167 Avenue.
“We’ve been feeding the Oakmont Reservoir through surplus water from the Morinville water line,” Galye said. “We were bleeding off the surplus water that they didn’t need, but Morinville and the region in that area is growing to a point where they need their water supply back.”
Galye said the majority of the work has been completed on the water main itself, with the exception of two tie-ins to the Epcor line, which will be finished when they’re ready to hook into the line.
“I’m hoping they are starting on the road rehabilitation and that should take us about three or four days, maybe a week, to get it back into shape so we can get to the point of reopening the road,” Galye said.
Though some residents whose yards back onto Poundmaker Road asked for an upgrade to the road to cut down on dust and dirt, Galye said the plan is still to rehabilitate it to an “as-was condition.”
“Right now we’re late in the season, we can’t do much with it anyways. So what we’re going to do is grade it, shape it and we’re going to put asphalt millings on it … to try and cap the roadway, to try and crown the roadway to get the water to drain off it,” Galye said. While the road is frozen there shouldn’t be an issue, he said, but once the frost starts to lift they’ll have to evaluate if any other work needs to happen, he said.
There have been some issues with bad ground conditions, Galye said. There was an open cut area that made the ground wet, which had to be dried out by the use of a disc plow, and some difficulty drilling under the Sturgeon River. Both issues have since been solved.
The project was tendered out to PSA Construction Inc., Galye said. The work was set to cost over $4 million, he said.
