BONNYVILLE – Construction on the Ardmore and Fort Kent fire halls is well underway and expected to be complete before the end of the year.
During the MD of Bonnyville’s April 6 committee meeting, general manager of infrastructure services Abid Malik updated council on the much-anticipated projects.
The Fort Kent fire hall is anticipated to be ready by the end of September.
“To date, excavation is completed. Piles are pulled and completed, forming and rebar placement for the footing is complete. In fact, as of (May 5) most of the footing is done,” Malik explained. "They’re getting ready for the pre-engineering to be there, which was just delivered to the site. Once the concrete gains the strength at the footing, they will start directing it.”
Once the base of the work is done, crews will start on completing the structure, paving the parking lot and driveway, and the electrical and mechanical work.
While Fort Kent's building is moving along, the Ardmore fire hall had a slight delay.
“As soon as construction started, they encountered poor, substandard subsoil conditions,” Malik detailed. “It contained a lot of organic material and debris, which wasn’t taken up at the geotechnical investigation at the time the geotechnical investigation was done.”
Coun. Dana Swigart was disappointed they weren't aware of the problem sooner.
“Over the last six years, Ardmore’s underground, as they’ve been doing that work and maintaining the roads, they’ve used that site location to lay dirt, topsoil, and clay as a dry-out location. So when they’re digging up a road, they have to roll the clay and dry it, they’d stockpile it there. There were all kinds of stuff dumped there that we probably should have known about.”
Although it delayed the project and was an unanticipated cost, CAO Luc Mercier noted the work still needed to be done.
“The additional work needed to be done to deal with it, they’re not extraordinary costs on the big project picture and we still think that the location still would have been chosen,” he stated. “It the end, it was missed but it didn’t, in our opinion, add a significant cost even if we would have known before.”
The total project budget was originally $5-million, and Malik said the anticipated costs are expected to come in just over that at about $5.16-million.
The excavation at the Ardmore location is roughly 75 per cent complete. Footing and grade beams are being formed, and the crew is getting ready for the pre-engineered building, which is scheduled to be delivered during the third week of May.
If all goes to plan, the building is expected to be commissioned by the end of November.