2020 Update #20

Almost There

The Governor’s announcement last Friday that outdoor construction crews could expand from two to five people put us on a path to restarting Middlebury’s downtown construction project.

The critical issue now from the Scott Administration’s point of view is continuing to protect the public health of the community—Addison County has had no new Covid-19 cases in nearly two weeks—when Kubricky’s construction crew is largely based across the Lake Champlain Bridge in Essex County NY. (Essex County has had 34 cases of the virus, roughly half the number in Addison County.)

The extensive discussions that have been taking place to resolve that concern seem to be yielding results and I’ll be back with a further update as soon as I have more news to share!

Getting Ready To Go

As you can imagine, Kubricky and its subcontractors are ready to hit the ground running and do their best to make up for lost time.

As I’ve mentioned, Fort Miller continues to fabricate the precast concrete pieces that will make up our downtown tunnel and rail abutments at its Schuylerville NY plant. Kubricky reports that Fort Miller has now fabricated 392 of the 422 pieces and is on schedule to complete the work in mid-May.

When the project restarts, one of the first orders of business will be to truck those pieces to the south marshaling yard at Fifield Farm.

Here in Vermont, SD Ireland got the go-ahead this week to reopen its Williston plant and has begun casting the 1100 concrete blocks that will form the rail corridor retaining wall at a rate of 20-30 blocks/day.

So the wheels are turning. Stay safe and I'll stay in touch.

That’s all for today. See you soon.

Please keep your comments and questions coming. Send me an email at jgish@townofmiddlebury.org and I’ll try to cover it in my next update.