We Bid Thee Well

Among the more routine undertakings by borough council is the awarding of bids, by law, to the lowest qualified bidder.

At tonight's meeting, they are poised to award four, for a variety of projects around Pottstown.

Perhaps the most expensive is a $389,000 bid which will be awarded for "storm sewer arch improvement."

As has become painfully clear in the last few years, as Pottstown was developed over the decades, the many streams and runs which ran through the area were, in essence, paved over.

Or rather, arches were built over them, many of them brick and mortar and many, now beginning to crumble.

Mercury Photo by Kevin Hoffman

This arch repair on the 100 block of Walnut Street cost
more than $400,000 to replace.

In the past several years, the borough has grappled with collapses on the 100 block of Walnut Street in 2004, North Hanover and Grant streets, as well as collapse on private property at the site of the former Frederick Brothers mill in 2011 at East and North Hanover streets.

The Walnut Street arch cost more than $400,000 to repair, although the borough did get $250,000 of the cost back from the federal government.

This current project, paid with a grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, will allow the borough to install "access" manhole covers in those on public property along the arch that covers the stream that enters the Manatawny Creek at Walnut Street.

Tracing it back upstream, it snakes through the borough, with one branch reaching sunlight opposite Lincoln Elementary School on North York Street, and another beneath the Frederick Brothers site and finally at Highland Cemetery and up into Upper Pottsgrove.

Mercury Photo by John Stricker

Public Works Director Doug Yerger inside

a storm arch near King Street.

Public Works Director Doug Yerger said access is needed in order to assess the condition of the arches. "We can't fix them if we don't know where they're falling down," he said.

Some money is supposed to be left over to "get and improve" some of the worst parts of this arch.

That money will probably be spent on Spruce Street where "we're having an arch that's beginning to collapse," Yerger said.

"The situation there is the same as the arch on Grant Street," which collapsed last winter, Yerger said.

"The water got underneath the foundation and undermined the foundation. We've got 30 feet of falling foundation and its going to get worse if we don't get it fixed," Yerger said.

 "These days, the rain comes in downpours anymore," observed Pottstown Borough Council President Stephen Toroney. "That has the water rushing through at high speed and its really bad for storm arches."

Photo by Evan Brandt

This arch, which collapsed on Grant Street near
The Hill School, 

has been repaired.

He added with a smile, "just like with your feet, falling arches are not a good thing."

The second most expensive bid to be awarded is $300,000 for street re-paving.

Yerger said the money should pay for about "a mile and three-quarters."

Related to that is a bid to replace manhole frames and lids, which are often left above or below grade grade when roads are re-paved.

As the photo here suggests, the last those bids will be for new street lights on High Street between Hanover and Manatawny streets.

Photo by Evan Brandt

The street lights along East High Street, between
Hanover and Manatawny streets, 

shown,
will be replaced as part of the bid expected to be
approved tonight.

Assistant Borough Manager Erica Weekley told council the borough received eight bids for the project and the winning bid, which came in at $174,000 is just under the $175,000 the borough received in a grant from Community Development Block Grant funds.

These funds come from the federal government and are administered through Montgomery County.

Weekley said the grant was received some time ago, but the project could not be put out to bid until some regulatory procedures were cleared up.

"We think it will make a nice improvement to downtown," she said of the lights.

The Iron Under Ground

Don’t be surprised if your street gets torn up next year.

Tuesday night, the Pottstown Borough Authority approved plans to conduct $2.9 million worth of sewer line replacements in 2014.

The decision comes on top of a previously approved plan to conduct $2.4 million in water line replacements in 2014 as well.

“We have to get on top of replacing our underground infrastructure,” said Authority Vice Chairman David Renn.  “If we let things go on as they are unchanged, eventually the whole system would collapse.”

Public Works Director Doug Yerger noted that “we are using pipes that were put in place in the early 1900s. There were pipes here before there were treatment plants.”

Chairman Tom Carroll said the authority is trying to hold off on incurring more debt and pay for repairs, upgrades and maintenance without borrowing.

“This is my sixth year on the authority and when I started, we were doing a lot of borrowing and people were saying money way cheap,” Carroll said. “But I kept looking at the interest we were paying and thinking money may be cheap, but not as cheap as not borrowing at all.”

Renn pointed out that 40 percent of the authority’s sewer budget goes toward bond payments.
“When 40 percent of your budget is debt, that’s terrible,” Renn said.

The authority pays $3 million a year toward re-paying bonds, an obligation that will continue until 2023, said Finance Director Janice Lee.

Instead, said Carroll, it is better for the authority to move ahead with needed replacement and pay for them as they go. That may require rate increases.

The finance office anticipates the sewer fund will end the year with $6 million in cash. However, by the time the five-year capital plan is completed, that cash will have dwindled to $2.3 million in the sewer fund, Carroll said.

Overall, that capital plan calls for 28 pipe replacement projects.

Tom Weld from BCM Engineering told the authority board that planning for the specific water and sewer projects for 2013 would be completed by January and would take 12 to 15 months to complete.

Bids would go out in the winter, so contractors looking to plan for spring work would likely give a better price, Weld said.

When possible, projects would be arranged to water and sewer pipe replacements can occur on the same street to avoid having to re-pave a street twice, he said.

If You Can't Stand the Heat, Get Out Your Wallet

Nati Harnik/Associated Press

Rows of corn stalks in a field south of Blair, Neb., this week. The drought-damaged field was cut down for silage. Can you afford higher food prices?

So it's hot.

It's summer, it's what we should expect right?

Well, it's becoming increasingly clear that not only is it hotter than it ever used to be, but that we have only ourselves to blame.

A National Audubon Society chart of how the greenhouse effect
is making our world warmer.

This comes as no surprise to scientists or those who believe scientists who tell them things they don't want to hear.

It does come as a shock to those living in the fairy land where it's all-natural, it will all be fine and stopping the climate from changing the face of the earth is not more important than jobs (read corporate profits).

Reuters reported yesterday that a new report due out in 2014 will contain evidence that not only is global warming -- climate change, fucked up weather, whatever want to call it -- our fault, but we can now find evidence our carbon footprint can be tied to specific events.

Thanks humans. Thanks a lot.

We're seeing a great deal of progress in attributing a human fingerprint to the probability of particular events or series of events," said Christopher Field, co-chairman of a U.N. report due in 2014 about the impacts of climate change."

"A report by Field's U.N. group last year showed that more weather extremes that can be linked to greenhouse warming, such as the number of high temperature extremes and the fact that the rising fraction of rainfall falls in downpours," according to Reuters.

From the Reuters report: Experts have long blamed a build-up of greenhouse gas emissions for raising worldwide temperatures and causing desertification, floods, droughts, heatwaves, more powerful storms and rising sea levels.

But until recently they have said that naturally very hot, wet, cold, dry or windy weather might explain any single extreme event, like the current drought in the United States or a rare melt of ice in Greenland in July.

But for some extremes, that is now changing.

NOAA's map of the 2011 heatwave in Texas

A study this month, for instance, showed that greenhouse gas emissions had raised the chances of the severe heatwave in Texas in 2011 and unusual heat in Britain in late 2011. Other studies of extremes are under way.

Growing evidence that the dice are loaded towards ever more severe local weather may make it easier for experts to explain global warming to the public, pin down costs and guide investments in everything from roads to flood defenses.

"One of the ironies of climate change is that we have more papers published on the costs of climate change in 2100 than we have published on the costs today. I think that is ridiculous," said Myles Allen, head of climate research at Oxford University's Environmental Change Institute.

"We can't (work out current costs) without being able to make the link to extreme weather," he said. "And once you've worked out how much it costs that raises the question of who is going to pay."

In just a few days this year, areas of the Greenland ice sheet that have
never shown any signs of melt before, did so.

Personally, I think the answer to that is pretty clear. You and I are going to pay, and in ways we might not have expected.

Sure, if you have a beach house on a barrier island in New Jersey, you may find it underwater in your lifetime or your children's, but you'll bail it out and rebuild it over and over again before it slips beneath the waves for the final time.

But for those of us without a beach house, we'll pay in other, more essential ways.

Like the 'freaky' storm that blew through the region Thursday. If one of those trees falls on your house, you'll have to pay to have it removed and to fix your house.

Kevin Hoffman/The Mercury

Thursday's "freaky" storm knocked
down this tree on W. Chestnut St.

And if one of those trees falls on some wires and knocks out power, you will have to pay to replace everything in your refrigerator or freezer.

Speaking of food, you'll soon be paying more for it anyway and you can thank global warming for that too.

As the New York Times reported Wednesday, the drought in the mid-west is now so bad, that prices for food basics will increase by 4 to 5 percent next year, just because of the loss of so much of the corn crop.

In fact, "more than half of the country was under moderate to extreme drought in June, the largest area of the contiguous United States affected by such dryness in nearly 60 years. Nearly 1,300 counties across 29 states have been declared federal disaster areas," the Times reported.

"The drought is now affecting 88 percent of the corn crop, a staple of processed foods and animal feed as well as the nation’s leading farm export," the Times reported.

"The drought comes along with heat. So far, 2012 is the hottest year ever recorded in the United States, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, whose records date to 1895," the Times reported (emphasis mine).

"That has sapped the production of corn, soybeans and other crops, afflicting poultry and livestock in turn," thus higher prices for beef and pork as well as vegetables.

2012 is already the hottest year ever recorded in the U.S.

Another way we'll pay is for new roads and, maybe, new or shored up nuclear power plants.

Also on Wednesday, the Times reported on how extreme weather conditions like heat, floods and wind storms, are taking their toll on the nation's infrastructure, infrastructure not designed to withstand such extremes.

"On a single day this month here, a US Airways regional jet became stuck in asphalt that had softened in 100-degree temperatures, and a subway train derailed after the heat stretched the track so far that it kinked — inserting a sharp angle into a stretch that was supposed to be straight. In East Texas, heat and drought have had a startling effect on the clay-rich soils under highways, which “just shrink like crazy,” leading to “horrendous cracking,” said Tom Scullion, senior research engineer with the Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M University. In Northeastern and Midwestern states, he said, unusually high heat is causing highway sections to expand beyond their design limits, press against each other and “pop up,” creating jarring and even hazardous speed bumps."

We know a thing or two about that.

A buckled section of road in North Carolina. How long before this
happens again on Route 422?

Just last month, in Upper Providence, Route 422 cracked under the extreme and very early heat wave that hit us.

And, in Limerick, it happened last year too, at just about this time.

Then there's the matter of nuclear power plants. We have one of those as well.

"In the Chicago area, a twin-unit nuclear plant had to get special permission to keep operating this month because the pond it uses for cooling water rose to 102 degrees; its license to operate allows it to go only to 100. According to the Midwest Independent System Operator, the grid operator for the region, a different power plant had had to shut because the body of water from which it draws its cooling water had dropped so low that the intake pipe became high and dry; another had to cut back generation because cooling water was too warm."

At the Limerick Generating Station, the cooling water is provided for most of the year by the Schuylkill River, on whose shores the plant is built.

The Schuylkill River intake of the Limerick nuclear plant.

But during the warmer months, when the river, also a drinking water source for more than one million Americans,is low and warm, the plant must draw water from the Delaware River, piping it over to Perkiomen Creek and then over to the plant.

For eight years, Exelon has been pumping water from an abandoned coal mine and from a reservoir near the river's headwaters, into the Schuylkill to augment the flow, and allow the company to pull more water from the Schuylkill than originally envisioned.

On Aug. 28, the Delaware River Basin Commission which has jurisdiction over such experiments, will hold a public hearing at Sunnybrook Ballroom in Lower Pottsgrove on a proposal to make that practice permanent.

Whether rising temperatures made this move necessary -- or will ultimately prove it moot -- is unknown.

Of course, not everything is global warming's fault -- although it is often still our own fault.

Unprecedented floods in Thailand last year, for instance, that caused $45 billion in damage according to a World Bank estimate, were caused by people hemming in rivers and raising water levels rather than by climate change, a study showed, Reuters reported.

And as our food prices go up because of a drought in the Mid-West, we should ask ourselves: Why we are building houses in Lancaster County, home to some of the most fertile, best farming soil in the world, where, currently, there is no drought?