NAHANT — The town’s $8.8 million Lynnway sewage pipeline reconstruction project will likely be completed in August, after months of traffic and lane closures, according to Town Administrator Antonio Barletta.
Earlier this summer, the town secured a low-interest loan through the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection’s Clean Water State Revolving Fund (SRF) to replace Nahant’s wastewater force main from the area of the Lynnway rotary to the Lynn Regional Wastewater Treatment Facility.
For the last five years, the old sewer main, built in the early 1980s to pump wastewater from the town’s Ward Road Pump Station to the Lynn Water & Sewer Treatment Plant, would break multiple times a year, Barletta said in an interview.
“With the old pipe being at the end of its life and the town experiencing multiple annual breaks, it’s very costly to the town, making those emergency repairs. So, fixing this section of the pipe and providing this new 50 year life to this section of the pipe should hopefully prevent those kinds of costly repairs for a while,” Barletta said. “The new pipe has a minimum 50 year lifespan, and it’s plastic. It’s HDPE, it’s a plastic material, where the old pipe was susceptible to electrolysis which is basically corrosion caused by methane gas inside the pipe and sitting in the salt water environment with other utilities in the area like gas and electrical conduit.”
While traffic caused by lane closures on the Lynnway may frustrate North Shore commuters, Barletta said that the increased traffic is not entirely due to the sewage line construction.
“Earlier this summer, DCR (Department of Conservation and Recreation), who controls the roadway, requested that construction be conducted at night to mitigate traffic congestion during day time commuter hours. It should be noted that other underground utility upgrades on the Lynnway has occurred and led to lane closures that are not associated with Nahant’s project,” Barletta said in an emailed statement.
Nahant’s project, despite the inconveniences that come with it, will ultimately benefit Lynn residents, as it will mitigate sewage breaks in and around the city, Barletta said.
“Although this project involves Nahant’s sewer main, the City of Lynn will also benefit from reduced disruptions on the Lynnway due to failures in the aging Nahant pipe. Nahant is a longtime customer of Lynn Water and Sewer, and the ratepayers of Nahant contribute to capital upgrades at the Lynn Wastewater Treatment Plant that serves Lynn, Nahant, Saugus and Swampscott. In regards to traffic, our project and its interruptions to travel lanes is temporary,” he said. “We hope that the new pipe will be commissioned in August so that a lot of the traffic that has been caused by construction should be subsided by then. We understand the impact it’s had on commuters of the Lynnway, and unfortunately it’s a part of underground utility construction, so we’re hoping to be done in August.”
Anthony Cammalleri can be reached at [email protected].
