Portion of Walnut Street to Close Due to Sinking Pavement

By Jeremy Coumbes on September 14, 2021 at 10:56am

Traffic along a section of West Walnut will be detoured soon in order to correct a sinking problem.

A portion of the street along West Walnut at the intersection of Prairie Street has been settling and needs to be corrected before the problem gets any worse.

During regular session last night, the Jacksonville City Council approved a bid of $127,127.27 from Rouland Construction and Trucking for the work to be completed.

Adam Fox with the engineering firm of Benton and Associates in Jacksonville says the section of road will have to be shut down completely due to what lays below the street.

We worked with IDOT over the last couple of months for permitting and preparing detour plans because the street will have to be closed down for a period of time. We are anticipating about a month of closure through there.

We will be excavating down through the existing subsurface materials down to the existing sixty-inch sanitary sewer there and determining if there is an issue there to take care of, or if not we will be backfilling back up with IDOT approved back fill materials and then doing a pavement patch on that street.”

The 60” sanitary sewer line is the main trunk that feeds to the Jacksonville Wastewater Treatment Plant just north of the location. Fox says the top of the pipe is 17 feet below the street making the process that much more difficult.

He says this project is similar in nature to work that was completed roughly a block east on Walnut when a similar issue happened near the JHS football field. He says in that instance, the problem was with the soil and not the sewer line.

We didn’t find anything wrong with that section of the sixty-inch sanitary that runs through there at that time, so that’s one of the things we are kind of watching for here is to determine is there an issue, is there not. Is it just that there was some inferior subsurface there that over time has settled. Is there something pulling it away that’s making it settle? A portion of the project is exploratory and to get then get the pavement surface back up to being smooth again.”

Fox says the contractor has estimated the project will take two weeks to complete, however a full month of shut down has been planned for the stretch of road. The total time will depend on what is found once the road is opened and the area inspected.

In other business last night, the council approved Petefish, Skiles, and Co. Bank as a depositor for the city. The bank based in Virginia, Illinois is opening a branch at the former PNC Bank building next to Dairy Queen on South Main Street. City Treasurer Ron Smiljanich made the request as well as for the former Jacksonville Savings Bank to be removed from the list.

Smiljanich says Jacksonville Savings Bank was still transitioning to CNB Bank the last time the list was updated.

The sale of certain surplus equipment was also approved, including a brush drop-off trailer, and two vesicles belonging to the police department.

Three resolutions involving TIF grant funding requests were pulled from the agenda and will be considered at the next City Council Meeting in two weeks.