EDMONTON — Now three years behind schedule, the City of Edmonton will need an additional $6.4 million to complete work on its Mill Woods flood mitigation project.
Originally budgeted at $41.4 million, the Mill Woods Double Barrel Replacement project is now expected to cost $81 million. The completion date is now scheduled for March 2017, more than three years after the original December 2013 completion date.
“It’s just another black eye as we go through our capital infrastructure programs,” Ward 11 councillor Mike Nickel said.
“I’m just absolutely livid and so are the people in Mill Woods.”
The upgrade to the sewer system in the area of 23 Avenue and 85 Street was spurred by major flooding in July 2004, when more than 400 homes in the area were flooded. Residents in the area were also left to clean up the mess from major flooding in 2012.
In order to reduce the risk of further flooding, capacity of the existing double barrel trunk sewer in Mill Woods needed to be increased.
The work caused traffic tie ups in the area, with each direction of 23 Avenue limited to one lane.
“They’re almost trapped in the neighbourhood,” Nickel said of area residents.
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The project has seen a number of setbacks along the way, too, suffering its first complication in November 2012. In April 2015, construction came to a halt after the discovery of “unanticipated poor ground conditions.” Crews hit soil so saturated it was like quicksand.
READ MORE: Mill Woods flood mitigation project suffers set back
“The challenges with the Mill Woods Double Barrel portion of the project are primarily attributed to lack of details during conceptual budget development and unanticipated ground conditions,” a city report released Thursday states.
In order to keep similar issues from happening in the future, city administration put forward four recommendations including assessing the amount of geotechnical investigation required for tunnel projects.
Nickel said because the City of Edmonton built Mill Woods, he wonders how the city could be surprised by the soil conditions. He’s also looking for more answers around who came up with the initial plan for the project.
“Who did the engineering around this project to provide the budget estimate of $41 million?” Nickel questioned. “I want to go back to those engineering questions and say, ‘Where were you? What did you do? And what assumptions failed here?’
“We can blame the soil conditions all we want, but the fact of the matter is they’re supposed to be engineered out, planned out, contingencies put in place well before this. But you can see this is totally, like I said, over the top.”
Read the full report below:
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