In order to upgrade some of Dawson Creek’s aging infrastructure just outside of town, the city will have to make it burst.
On Monday, council voted to approve hiring Bill Jacobsen Trucking, a Dawson Creek-based company, to carry out the pipe bursting and upsizing of sanitary lines east of 21st Street and north of the Alaska Highway through a method called pipe bursting.
This evoked some initial skepticism from councillor Terry McFadyen.
“Pardon me, but I thought bursting pipes was a bad thing?”
However, the city’s director of infrastructure and sustainable development, Kevin Henderson, told council that the idea would work.
“This is a technique of trenchless replacement,” he added.
Trenchless replacement is where pipes can be replaced without having to dig around the pipes. Henderson said that the city would dig up a couple of key locations in between where they would want the pipe to be fixed. Afterwards, a bursting head would be dragged through the old pipes, bursting them, while simultaneously a second head would pull in new pipes.
These pipes will need to go underneath the railway tracks, and in their request for proposals, Jacobsen Trucking offered to do the job for approximately $134,000. The City was given $120,000 to do the job from the Peace River Regional District, and the other $14,000 will have to come out of the 2013 budget.
The funding was given to the city to take the Harper Subdivision into its sewer system.
Staff will still have to negotiate a timeline for the work, according to a report by Shawn Dahlen, deputy director of infrastructure and sustainable development.
