At first Lawrence Bakalich thought maybe Nicor was giving it a rest on election day. For the first time in a month, he and other residents who live along Northgate Court and Northgate Road, awoke to the sounds of birds chirping instead of the relentless beep-beeping of trucks backing up.
“I thought maybe they did it because of voting day,” said Bakalich, a 42-year-resident of Northgate Court. “I thought maybe it was a dream and that they’d be back the next day – but nothing. I walked over there and … the place is neat as a pin.”
Since March 1, workers used the former water pumping station property on Northgate Court as a staging area for Nicor’s effort to replace all natural gas mains in the village of Riverside and connect new gas service to all residences.
But as of last week, materials and equipment are now being stored at North Riverside Park Mall, where Nicor’s contractor, NPL, has set up a new staging area in the southeast corner of the parking lot, near the water tower.
Previously, Nicor’s contractors from NPL used the Northgate site as a storage area for sand and gravel, large coils of flexible plastic gas pipe and vehicles.
Trucks working at various locations in the village would make repeated trips to the site, starting first at 6 a.m. and, later, at 7 a.m., collecting or dumping loads of gravel and depositing additional equipment for the job.
Residents complained to village officials about the noise, dirt and damage done to property near the work site. Initially, officials told Nicor they needed to start an hour later in the day and could no longer dump construction debris at the site.
But as March closed, it was evident the solution was just not going to work.
“I think the Northgate yard was entirely too small to handle staging for Nicor, which is evident from the complaints that came from surrounding residents,” said Public Works Director Greg Koch. “We wanted to help Nicor move to get the job done as quickly as possible to help our residents and Northgate seemed to make sense. But it was causing too much noise and conflicts with people in their daily lives. We wanted to limit those impacts.”
According to Koch, Nicor contacted Riverside on April 6, agreeing to move the entire staging site elsewhere. Some of the equipment, including storage trailers and vehicles, has been moved to the Department of Public Works site in Riverside Lawn.
Sean McCarthy, senior regional community relations director with Nicor, said that the village asked Nicor to vacate the Northgate site and that as of April 8, it was no longer working there.
McCarthy said he believed the decision to change the timeline for the Riverside project from five years to one year probably led to the increased complaints. Nicor expects all of Riverside to have new gas service installed by the end of 2009.
Nicor contractors will continue to dispose of construction debris at the public works site, where it is stored until it’s transferred to a landfill.
However, Koch said that Nicor is not permitted to store any construction materials, such as gravel, sand and gas piping, at the public works site.
“We don’t have the storage room for it and that type of operation would impede our ability to respond to our own work, especially during the summer,” Koch said.