City of St. John's reviewing Water Street 'big dig' plans

The city of St. John's is reviewing its plan to dig up Water Street to replace aging infrastructure.

This spring it willexploreacheaper, less-invasive way to replace century-old water and sewer pipes fromWaldegraveStreet to Job's Cove,saidpublic works committee chair Coun. Danny Breen on Thursday.

"One of the things that we are looking at now is that it may be possible to do this with through a trenchless remediation," he said.

"What that means is that you wouldn't have a complete tear-up as you would in a traditional reconstruction and replacement of the underground infrastructure. So basically you would go down and reline the pipe,the main sewer,inside. You would have various entry points along the pipe that you would enter in to do the remediation."

The city hopes this method, which Breen saidhas been used before to do work on WishingwellRoad,would have less impact on downtown businesses, which have complained loudly about the city's original plans to dig up Water Street.

"It would be much better for the downtown area because it would certainly leave pedestrian traffic to move about much easier than a traditional infrastructure replacement.

It is not certain that the city will use "trench-less remediation"yet.

"So we have come to the conclusion that it's a good idea to do the testing to see if this is going to work so this spring our plan is to do an investigation down below to see if we can do this," said Breen.

Once this exploratory work is complete, staff will report back to Council with a recommendation as to whether or not this is a viable option to pursue. If viable, the project will proceed as planned in 2017 using this approach.

Breen says if the trenchless method is used the cost of the entire project could drop from $20 million to $11 million.