Allan Appel Photo
Three months after a major sawing mishap threw off construction work, Prospect Street partially reopened Monday in time to welcome returning Yale students.
Yale grad student Derek West (at right in photo) was disappointed when city Assistant Engineer Larry Smith (at left) told him he wouldn’t be able to drive his car over a fully repaired Prospect Street Bridge until December, and more likely not until June of next year. But there was good news, especially for sick Yalies.
On Monday morning, Prospect was opened for local traffic, but only to wind up and around on Canal Street. It’ll be one-way up Prospect and then also one-way left onto Canal. Prospect will continue to be closed beyond Trumbull through the spring and more likely until June, according to city officials.
A big part of the timing of Monday’s limited reopening of the roadway to local traffic was that returning Yale students would have vehicular access to the new Yale Health Center on Canal at Ashmun.
Pointing to his watch, Smith said, “They told us they’d be booking patients today.”
At the construction-clogged Prospect-Trumbull intersection work continued not on repairs to the bridge itself but a coffer dam to advance a sewer line separation project being conducted by C. Fucci Contractors for the Greater New Haven Pollution Control Authority..
Repairs to the bridge itself were thrown way off schedule three months ago, when a worker mistakenly sawed through a rebuilt rebar concrete slab beneath the bridge’s decking.
Smith had called the accident “one of the most stupidest things I have ever seen in my life.”. Click here to read that story.
At around 9:30 a.m. Monday, shortly after flagman John Wilkinson moved the temporary barriers, a delivery van bearing linen rolled through toward the new health building. A while later, an official-looking construction vehicle, and another van delivering Yale library books to the Becton Center across from the Grove Street Cemetery, both passed through the long-impassable roadway.
As to the repairs on the bridge itself, Smith said, “We can’t do that until the sewer line is in.”
When the rebar was sliced through, it became necessary to replace the full “membrane” of the bridge and then do a complete re-concreting and repaving as well. None of that can be done until the sewer line project is complete.
The concrete mixing facilities close before winter, Smith cautioned.
With that, the sewer line separation project, Yale’s own nearby construction of its two new residential colleges, and so much else not within his control, he said the intersection and bridge might be finished by December — if a “perfect storm” of coordination falls into place — but more likely by early summer 2011.
“I hate to promise something without full confidence,” Smith said.
Reached by phone at the tail end of his vacation, City Engineer Richard Miller was a tad more optimistic.
“There are other projects in the area dictating when we reopen. We’re going to be playing it by ear. Our concern is we have is to make sure all the stuff happening in there is that you don’t have to open and close it constantly.”
He said it was not a good idea to open, for example, temporarily, and people establish traffic patterns that then have to be disrupted again.
So Derek West, a Yale graduate student who works at Prospect and Sachem, was resigned to keep using the Temple Street Bridge.
Miller did add that with luck the Prospect and Trumbull intersection could be fully open as early as the spring.
The next task for city engineers, according to Smith: a better route for the growing volume of students and others on foot or bike snaking in close proximity to the construction zone.