Photo by Lester Smith
On the morning of September 29, one excavator is digging deep across Halladay Avenue West, and another is preparing the north-side trench for the final road crossing of the Suffield section of the Tennessee Gas Pipeline’s Connecticut Expansion Project. The roadside pipe seen standing vertically near the end of the silt fence is an accessory of the smaller line installed across Suffield in 1951.
The last road crossings of the Tennessee Gas pipeline project have been completed, a great deal more of the pipe is in the ground and covered, and on October 14, the corporate communications office in Houston emailed that the Connecticut Expansion Project, as the installation of this short stretch of added pipe is called, remained on schedule. That is, the “general restoration” of the right of way is expected to be complete by November 1.
The final under-road bore was completed at Mountain Road at the beginning of October. It had taken an array of drill points flanking the boring machine pit to suck the water out of the ground and allow the work to proceed at this wet location.
The Hale Street and Halladay Avenue crossings were made by trenching across the road, which required those roads to be fully closed for about one day each: Hale on September 29 and Halladay on September 30. At Halladay the closing lasted into the next morning, as the work had cut a water main, apparently another example of poor communication among public utilities. (It was a sanitary sewer that was cut on Russell Avenue.)
The final major water crossing, which passed under Stony Brook north of Hale Street, was made near the end of September, leaving a neat site with some new rip-rap along the banks.
Along the route, there was still a good deal of activity getting the final stretches of pipe safely in the ground with all its joints properly welded and all the pipe weights added where needed. At certain locations, active cathodic protection was installed to deter corrosion.
As for the “general restoration,” by mid-October, newly seeded grass was sprouting in the vicinity of the line’s Hickory Street crossing, and northeast of the North Street crossing, the landscape crew was completing the grading, rough clean-up, fertilizing, liming, seeding, and mulching with a layer of straw.