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Contract awarded for pipe replacement at pollution control centre

NANAIMO – Regional District of Nanaimo aims for next year for construction.

The Regional District of Nanaimo board has awarded a contract for marine pipe replacement work at the Greater Nanaimo Pollution Control Centre.

Directors voted last week to award Opus Dayton Knight a $742,000 engineering services contract for work related to the replacement of the Five Fingers marine outfall.

“There will be construction services as part of this, so they'll do the engineering design, they'll tender that, they'll evaluate the proposals from the contractors that come in and then once the contractor starts working on site, they will ensure that they're constructing the outfall to the specifications within the contract,” said Sean De Pol, district manager of wastewater services.

He said the work will consist of replacement of an existing pipe with future flows being taken into consideration. The work will be complicated, said De Pol, and will involve pipe being floated and sunk into place.

Being that the work will take place in an environmentally sensitive area, there will be consultation with Ministry of Environment, Fisheries and Oceans Canada and other agencies to ensure construction adheres to environmental requirements.

“We have qualified professionals that we've hired and they will propose what's going to be constructed and how it will protect the environment but we still need approval from those (government) agencies to say that they accept that, so they will have some input into ultimately what is constructed,” De Pol said.

The regional district is planning to begin construction in 2015 but a lot of preparation is needed in a tight time frame.

“We want to meet the best tides, which are during the summer, and best weather, so if we miss that window, which will mean that we'll really need to have the construction contract awarded late-spring/early-summer, we're going to be out by an entire calendar year,” said De Pol.

Last year, the board awarded a $240,000 contract to Aecom to oversee a land pipe replacement project, which is currently taking place.

Of the $742,000, 50 per cent will come from development cost charges and the remainder will come from general reserves.



Karl Yu

About the Author: Karl Yu

After interning at Vancouver Metro free daily newspaper, I joined Black Press in 2010.
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