5.25.09

$1.3 million project: Road work on bricks calls for a few tricks
By: Virgil Larson, Omaha World-Herald

The idea of tearing out and rebuilding a street could be enough to strike terror in the heart of Old Market merchants.

After all, the area depends on people strolling the streets and freely crossing them while browsing in shops and walking to restaurants. To get people within walking distance, the area years ago switched from parallel parking to diagonal to create more spots.

So rebuilding the brick streets by ripping them up curb to curb for extended periods is an option the city has rejected. The operative phrase for getting rid of the ruts and sunken spots might be "minimal disruption."

Just one block -- 11th Street from Farnam at the north edge of the district to Harney -- will be taken out entirely to be re-bricked. Long runs of asphalt now cover as much of that block as the bricks do.

"We're tearing that out and completely restoring it to a brick street," City Engineer Charlie Krajicek said. "We are going to pick up every brick and tear out everything and re-lay the bricks."

But the rest of the Old Market -- roughly 10th to 13th and south to Jackson -- will be fixed with spot repairs that will allow traffic to keep crawling in the continuous search for parking spots.

Preliminary underground work on gas and water mains is under way and also being done with emphasis on minimizing disruption.

Anything else is "not acceptable anymore," Krajicek said.

Joe Gudenrath, executive director of the Downtown Improvement District, said he has heard no complaints about disruption from Old Market businesses about the work done thus far nor about plans for further work.

Nor has Tony Abbott, owner of the French Café, who said he has seen improvement work in the Old Market going back 40 years. Considering the results to be expected from resurrecting the brick streets, he said he would consider some inevitable disruption to be minimal.

A stroll around the area with eyes to the ground suggests there's a lot of spot repairs to be done.

There are "extremely bad" areas where bricks have sunk that will have to be dug out and brought up to grade, Krajicek said. "Those are scattered throughout the Old Market, the worst ones."

The work will include rebuilding the underlying concrete base where needed and replacing concrete curbs in some areas with granite ones to match the ones used in other areas.

The city as yet has no firm timetable, Krajicek said. "We hope it begins late this summer or into the fall, but that's dependent on getting approvals," he said. "We don't get the money until we get all the approvals done."

"Approvals" refers to federal oversight. Earlier this month the Nebraska Department of Roads announced $500,000 in federal stimulus funds for the $1.3 million in Old Market street work. The money is to be routed through the department's Traffic Enhancement Program.

Cities and other entities don't get the federal money until the work is done, said Mary Joe Oie, spokeswoman for the Roads Department.

MUD is already well into its part of the project. It started replacing 125-year-old cast iron gas mains last summer and will finish the work this year, aiming for completion in August. It plans to begin upgrading 110-year-old cast-iron water mains in August and be done in October.

The utility might have been well into the water mains project but for George Clooney's April movie-making in Omaha.

"We had planned to do the water mains this spring before the College World Series but when we found they were going to be filming a movie down there we decided that was not in the city's best interests," said Jeff Schovanec, M.U.D.'s senior design engineer for infrastructure.

To provide water to Old Market buildings and fire hydrants while the mains are being updated, M.U.D. will lay temporary pipes, six inches in diameter, in the streets.

The 1895 mains, 10 to 12 inches in diameter, won't actually be replaced. That would entail digging trenches four to five feet wide and five to six feet deep in the streets.

"We'd be down there for a good part of a year," Schovanec said. "We're just not going to do that."

Instead, an M.U.D. contractor will slip plastic liners, which Schovanec described as looking and feeling like a fire hose, into the old mains. To do that, pits will be dug here and there to get at the mains.

Using liners will cost less than laying new mains and take a fraction of the time, Schovanec said.

"We're going to have to do quite a bit of work, but the disruption to the Old Market (using the liners) pales in comparison to us completely replacing that pipe," he said.

M.U.D. is not trenching to install new gas mains, either. Instead, it is digging pits from which to bore beneath the streets to create tiny tunnels through which to drive new plastic gas pipes.

"We can dig a pit and then bore several hundred feet under the pavement," Schovanec said.

The cast-iron gas mains, laid in 1887, will be left where they are.

M.U.D. will spend about $1.1 million on the Old Market work. That comes out of the infrastructure replacement charge ($2 for water and $3 for gas) customers find on their monthly M.U.D. bills. No federal stimulus money is involved.

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