As Nicor ramps up its plan to replace Riverside’s old natural gas mains throughout the village, residents living near the former Northgate water pumping facility say they’re bearing the brunt of the construction effort.
The village is allowing Nicor to use the Northgate site as its primary staging point, and residents say trucks come and go all day, at times blocking driveways, and the 7 a.m. daily start time has become their alarm clock.
While the village in the last two weeks has asked Nicor to shift some of the operation to its public works site in Riverside Lawn, those near the Northgate staging area say not much has changed since Nicor restarted its work in early March.
“They’ve added three times the equipment and two more gravel piles in the past week,” said Don Brandon, who lives on Northgate Road directly west of the old pumping station.
Last week, trucks unloaded huge coils of the plastic yellow 2-inch gas main piping, which is being laid throughout much of central and north Riverside. Other trucks haul in piles of gravel, which is used to backfill areas excavated by Nicor, regularly.
“Sometimes it’s every other day; some days it’s twice a day, depending on what they need,” Brandon said.
Trucks come and go from Northgate all day, picking up loads of gravel and equipment.
Nicor began its project to replace gas mains in Riverside last fall, when work was done in the First Division south of the railroad tracks and along the village’s northern border.
Initially, the work was expected to take five years to complete, but Nicor has decided to replace all gas mains and gas meters in Riverside by the end of 2009.
“We decided it was such a low-pressure system that we should accelerate it and finish it this year,” said Sean McCarthy, senior regional communications director for Nicor, who added that the company is installing some 90,000 feet of new gas mains.
Almost all of Riverside’s natural gas service is delivered through low-pressure gas lines which allow condensation which blocks gas service.
Because the old gas mains are located under streets, Nicor must dig up the pavement to fix leaks or repair lines. The new lines are being placed in the parkways.
McCarthy added that the gas main installation could last into October and that the company hoped all of the new service connections would be installed “this calendar year.”
Robin Snyder Mooney, who lives directly north of the Northgate site said the return of Nicor’s trucks a few weeks back “was like a Poltergeist scene.”
“I heard them at 7 a.m. and thought, ‘They’re ba-a-a-ck.’ It’s like the trucks back up in a circle all day, going ‘beep, beep, beep.'”
Josh McCleary, who rents a condo in the building directly south of the site said the activity “hasn’t bothered me personally that bad other than it’s an eyesore. If I owned the place, I might have a different perspective.”
Brandon took his complaints to the village board on March 16, which brought visits the next morning from several village officials, including President Harold J. Wiaduck Jr. and trustees Ben Sells and Kevin Smith.
Sells, in particular, was incensed by what he saw.
“Why can’t we just clear out of there?” asked Sells, who requested that the whole operation be staged from the public works site in Riverside Lawn. “We’re still waking people up in the morning. If it’s a matter of convenience, I’m more concerned with the convenience of the people who live here than Nicor.”
Wiaduck said he was in favor of monitoring the situation at Northgate “carefully” but advocated letting Nicor continue to use the area for staging the project. The work is being done north of the tracks, so the site makes sense, he said.
“I understand what you’re saying,” Wiaduck told Sells during a special meeting of the village board on March 23. “This morning I had one of those trucks in front of my house. It’s not happening in just one location.”
“But it’s in one location every day,” said Sells, who could not get a majority of trustees to take him up on his suggestion for moving the staging area.
In response to residents’ complaints, Village Manager Kathleen Rush said that some changes have been made. First, Riverside is taking its own public works equipment (light poles, sewer covers, fire hydrants, water pipes) stored at Northgate to the public works site to make sure they aren’t damaged.
Nicor has been notified they can’t start working until 7 a.m.; they previously had been starting as early as 6 a.m. And trucks are no longer allowed to dump debris from excavation sites at Northgate, where a temporary transfer station had been set up and which increased truck traffic significantly.
Public Works Director Greg Koch said last week that Nicor is now combining its debris with that of the village’s street sweeper and that Nicor will pay for hauling all of the debris to a landfill while the work continues.
Despite the changes, Brandon said he hasn’t seen much of a change. Trucks still jam the Northgate site overnight and work crews line up early along the street to drink coffee and chat before starting work at 7 a.m.
“There’s not a thing that’s really changed,” Brandon said.