Contractor conflicts
Utility relocations hold up road projects
“Most of the problems are with underground utilities. You can’t see them, so you don’t know what’s there. Nobody’s got X-ray vision.” Bryan Harmon, DPW deputy director
More than four months after a major O’Neal Lane road widening project was to have been completed, contractor Hilliard Barber found himself on the side of the road near the intersection of Firewood Avenue one day recently. He was staring into an 8-foot deep pit and he did not like what he saw.
Instead of digging trenches and laying storm drainage pipe as planned, Barber’s crews were sorting their way through a tangle of uncovered utility lines that were supposed to have been moved months earlier. His equipment sat idle, with dozens of 8-foot sections of 42-inch diameter pipe stacked nearby.
It was the latest in a series of delays that Barber, president of Barber Brothers Contracting Co., said has plagued construction work on O’Neal Lane and at South Harrell’s Ferry Road nearby, making the $28 million project one of the most frustrating jobs his company has ever tackled.
Barber and other contractors say utility relocation — getting overhead power lines and buried telephone cables, fiber-optic and gas and water lines out of the way — has become a major problem as the city-parish pursues an aggressive schedule of sewer construction and road improvement work.
“To the contractors working in East Baton Rouge Parish, it’s the No. 1 problem,” said Ken Naquin, chief executive of Louisiana Associated General Contractors. “It’s a universal problem, but in Baton Rouge it’s exacerbated by the volume of work taking place. The utilities only have so much resources to put on relocation issues.”
City-parish Department of Public Works officials and program managers overseeing road and sewer work concede that utility relocation has posed significant problems for some projects. They say they do everything possible to head the problems off but must rely on information provided by utility companies about the location of their facilities when plans are drawn for road and sewer construction projects.
“There is a lot of effort made early on to try to identify what’s out there and where the utilities are located,” said DPW Deputy Director Bryan Harmon. “Most of the problems are with underground utilities. You can’t see them, so you don’t know what’s there. Nobody’s got X-ray vision.”
At the end of the day, “utility relocations are the responsibility of the utility companies,” Harmon said. The city-parish also has to rely on estimates that the utility companies provide for how long the process will take when they put a road or sewer construction project out for bid, he said.
Doing the best they can
Utility company representatives say they do the best they can to clear the way for construction projects but said that determining exactly where utilities are buried and getting them moved is sometimes challenging — especially when multiple utilities share the same confined right-of-way space.
“We’ve had our struggles but when you look at where we are in building and the progress we’ve made, I think we’ve made excellent strides,” said Darrell Jones, area manager for AT&T’s design office in Baton Rouge.
He said when conflicts arise during excavation work, AT&T tries to get crews out promptly to address them.
“When we started this, it was moving fast, and we’ve learned a lot of lessons,” Jones said. “O’Neal Lane appears to be one that’s lagging. There’s a lot in the ground, and the more that’s in the ground, the more difficult it is to locate (lines). It gets pretty congested.”
Representatives from Entergy and Baton Rouge Water Co. also said they work closely with project managers and contractors to get their utilities moved out of the way.
The first step in actual construction is removing trees, mailboxes, fences and any other obstructions that are in the right of way where a road is being widened or a sewer line is being installed, according to Harmon and DPW Director William Daniel.
The process is known as clearing and grubbing.
After contractors complete that work, utility companies move in to relocate any lines they have that conflict with the construction work. The utility companies are required to do so under franchise agreements and may or may not receive compensation, depending on the location and circumstances, Daniel said.
But there are no penalties applied to utility companies if they fail to get their lines moved within the time period estimated for the work, Daniel said. And sometimes, he acknowledged, conflicts are not discovered until excavation is under way because a utility company’s records might show an underground line is in a different location or is buried at a different depth than turns out to be the case.
“It’s not uncommon for them to say they have moved all of their utilities and everything is clear and we’ll be out there one day and find more utilities,” Daniel said.
Harmon emphasized that the problem is not unique to Baton Rouge and that contractors working on public works projects across the country often do not discover hidden utility issues until they start excavation, especially in urban areas where lots of development has occurred over a period of years.
“Every building, every house, every facility in this parish has to have power,” Harmon said. “It has to have water. It has to have sewer. They almost all have gas, electric, telephones. Every one of those utilities connect to every structure that’s out there so there are conflicts.”
The delays attributable to utility conflicts can be costly to contractors, throwing them off their schedules and interfering with their ability to complete other work, Naquin said. Although contractors get extra days added to their schedules for utility related delays, they are not compensated for actual costs, he said.
As an example, Naquin said, a contractor might have four jobs going on. A utility relocation delay of 180 days on one project can disrupt the schedules of all four projects because a contractor might not have the resources available to allocate for the projects on the timetable when he anticipated needing the resources.
“From the construction industry’s standpoint, the public owner and the utility companies lose nothing,” Naquin said. “The only one that loses is the contractor community. It costs them time, money and frustration. Their patience grows thin.”
More time, more resources
Daniel expressed little sympathy for contractors whom he said sometimes over extend themselves. He said each project is put out for bid independent of the other and has to be considered independently. Contractors should anticipate running into utility relocation issues, he said.
“It’s not our responsibility that the job go exactly like they want so that they can move their equipment from one job to the other,” Daniel said. “They bid on it. They assume the risks on that job.”
He also said that contractors often can proceed with other work on a project during utility delays.
But Jesse Spence, project manager for F.G. Sullivan Construction Co., said it “breaks up your rhythm and costs you more money to build” when a project stretches out for several months due to utility delays.
He said the company ran into several utility conflicts similar to what Barber Brothers is experiencing on O’Neal Lane and South Harrell’s Ferry Road with F.G. Sullivan’s work on the $7.121 million Brightside Lane widening project. The company encountered more than 20 instances where underground lines had not been identified and moved, Spence said.
“You do expect to find one or two (utility conflicts), but you don’t expect to find a conflict with the entire installation on your project,” Spence said. “Additional time doesn’t give you additional money. When you delay a project for 190 calendar days, it will push you into scheduling conflicts with other projects.”
Spence said the project falls “into the category of one of the top five worst projects” in F.G. Sullivan’s history as a company.
Spence said his boss uses an analogy to describe what happens to a contractor on projects like Brightside Lane: “It’s like someone hiring you to build a one-story house and when you get done, you’ve built them a two-story house at the same price. Basically, that’s what’s happening.”
At the O’Neal Lane/South Harrell’s Ferry Road job site, Gary Sanders, pipe manager for Barber Brothers, said it is important for the safety of workers and the public that utilities be out of the way when doing excavation work. He said the project is the worst he’s ever encountered in 30 years of construction work.
The problems included rupturing a gas line on South Harrell’s Ferry Road that was buried at a shallower depth than reflected in the utility’s records.
Barber said the driver of a piece of heavy equipment called a stabilizer, which does road grinding, jumped off the vehicle after the line was struck for his own safety. The spewing natural gas was sucked into the engine, causing it to rev up. He said the engine was destroyed and will cost $70,000 to replace.
“You’ve got to just hope that this nightmare ends and we can get out of the ground and start paving,” Barber said.
Michael Songy, a principal partner with CSRS, Inc., program manager for the city-parish’s Green Light Plan of parish road improvements, said the original schedule called for work on the O’Neal Lane and South Harrell’s Ferry Road project to start in September 2009 and be completed in September 2011.
Songy said 266 days were added to the construction schedule due to utility relocation and weather delays, so the job is currently expected to be completed in July. However, Songy said, other change orders are expected to drainage and sewer plans that will further extend the completion date.