The
process is this: a community meeting is called for the neighbourhood affected a year before any action is taken. There must be a majority of homeowners vote to have the sanitary sewer installed. We want it because we never know when the septic field in our clay soil in the back yard might cause a costly failure. The street work is government subdized but will still cost each home owner around $8,000; plus another $8,000 to hire a private contractor to connect our home to the pipes buried in the street. These are only a few of the photos I took of the big backhoes and dump trucks and compactors, etc. All of these photos taken in front of our home. It was quite exciting.
The trench down the middle of our street was 16 feet deep, and it is still above the grade of the bottom of our house. That means we will have to have a pump installed. No sewer if the power goes out.
The sand around the pipes and the fill on top of that is well compacted, as you can see from the man-handled compactor in the bottom, the machine compactor on the boom of the backhoe, and the roller in the photo below. Anything that vibrated, like the compactors, shook our home. Didn't matter what room we moved to, things were rattling and shaking. After several days of this, my nerves were vibrating. Told my friend I came to visit him to get away from it all.
These last three photos show them digging up our driveway. The white pipe goes to our property line; one for us and one for our neighbour. We will hire someone next year to connect to the black pipe for our personal connection.
I have to give the guys credit. They were pleasant and worked at using acceptable language and answering all our questions. They even compacted a section of fill for my new wall that will widen my parking pad. That was real nice of them. I got to know Mike, the engineer, best. He represented our municpality to make sure the contractors did the job right. Everyone tried to keep the roads open to one way traffic just about every day. We parked a block away only a few days. Tune in to my next blog for the last photos to see our new road. We all shouted for joy, when after three months of vibrating, dust and very bumpy road (though I liked neighbours driving slowly), our street was done.
