Repairs to a collapsing section of Market Street in Glasco could cost as much as $1.5 million, engineer Gregory Gifford of Gifford Engineering told the Saugerties Town Board at its regular meeting on September 4.
The problem is not new; Market Street has been collapsing since the brickyards in Glasco closed in the 1950s, according to supervisor Fred Costello. “More recently, that seems to have accelerated. Mr. [highway superintendent Ray] Mayone has taken an attitude where he wants to repair it once and for all, and he has worked with [town engineer] Dennis Larios and brought in Gifford Engineering, which has worked with us on other projects in Saugerties, and they have done a pretty comprehensive analysis of the soils below the road,” Costello said.
In describing his background, Gifford said that he has studied the clay soils in the Connecticut River Valley, which are similar to the soils in Glasco. When building in areas with clay soils, there are three principles to consider. One: “You don’t add weight to the top of the slope. If you put extra weight on top, it will tend to slide down. The second is: Don’t remove soil from the toeof the slope; it will all slide down in a big pile. The third has to do with the groundwater table,” said Gifford, explaining that in wet seasons, the table rises, possibly causing slides. “Landslides typically happen in spring, following a long winter. Snowpack melts, raising the water table, and you typically get landslides in the spring.” On the other hand, “If you take soil from the top of the slope, or you add weight to the toe of the slope, or you lower the groundwater table, all of those will stabilize the slope.”
Variations in groundwater can be extreme: The depth in front of one house on Market Street varied between 22 feet and nine feet below the ground surface, Gifford said. “That’s artesian pressure, bubbling up out of the ground,” which adds to the already-existing pressure.
The plan includes lowering a part of Market Street by three feet, and using the removed material to build up the “toe” of the slope. The hope is to reduce the artesian pressure that is causing sections of the road to collapse. While the work is being done, some new wells will allow constant monitoring of the water level, Gifford said. “If we can see it going down, that would make me feel happy.”
The plan includes the installation of ten drains along Market Street at 15 feet below the existing grade to lower the water table. “When all this is done, we should have a safety factor of about 1.5. That means the pressure to stay in place is 1.5 times the power that wants to move it,” Gifford said.
One effect of the work will be to straighten Market Street, which has moved over the years as a result of the ongoing erosion. “If you look at old mapping, Market Street back in the 1920s was a straight street. Now this landslide has been happening, cutting away at it and moving it to the north.” Part of the project would be to return Market Street to its original configuration, he said.
One questioner wanted to know whether the improvements in the drainage of Market Street would affect residents below Market in the rest of the hamlet. The drainage would be directed to the next street down, Delaware Street, and into a drainage swale, Gifford said. While water from Market Street would be directed toward Delaware Street for drainage, “There will be no impact on residents of Delaware Street, said Department of Public Works supervisor Ray Mayone.
Gifford broke down the cost estimate for the project. The actual construction cost is pegged at $1.27 million. An additional ten percent of the cost was added for contingency; that comes to $127,000. “We may or may not use that,” Gifford said. “If the contingency is not used, that $1.5 million would become $1.4 million.”
Market Street has been sinking for the last 80 years, Mayone said. “This spring we went to put some fill along the shoulder of the road, and dig out the [old] blacktop. Some of the blacktop was four feet thick. That tells you how many years highway superintendents have been repairing this road. Probably 10 or 15 highway superintendents have been trying to stabilize this road. The road will never be stabilized unless we do something like this to permanently fix it.”
Mayone said that he would recommend that the project be built with borrowed money, to be paid back over 15 or 20 years. While he is aware that the cost of the project would come out of the highway budget, to pay for it in the same year as it is done would drain funds needed to maintain roads in the rest of the town. “We do a lot of blacktopping, a lot of maintenance work, and we need to keep up our trucks.”
Mayone pointed out that the drainage on Market Street is not the only highway problem in the town. There are two other problems that will eventually have to be fixed, and “They will be somewhat near this cost,” he said. “I hope it will be on the next superintendent, not on me; I’ve had enough with this problem.”
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