A CUTTING-EDGE engineering project on the city’s downtown waterfront is about to get underway, with some inconveniences for visitors to the beach and Bryant Park.
On Wednesday, Aug. 28, crews are scheduled to start digging a narrow 3,350-foot tunnel beneath the Intracoastal Waterway south of the Lake Worth Bridge. The passage, called a bore, will allow for the installation of new electrical lines connecting the mainland with the city’s casino complex on the barrier island.
The 24-kilovolt lines will replace aging 4K “submarine cables,” as they’re known, believed to have been dropped into the seafloor mud as long as 60 years ago.
“The last time this was done, we assume they just pulled a plow across and laid it into the ground,’’ said Ed Liberty, Lake Worth Beach’s electric utility director.
“That’s not unusual for cable back then. This will be much more sophisticated.’’
Here’s how it will work.
Crews with Accurate Drilling Systems will use a trenchless construction system called horizontal directional drilling to dig a hole roughly 3 feet in diameter from the beach’s lower parking lot along State Road A1A west beneath the lagoon to a spot in Bryant Park.
“We are going to be digging down deep,’’ Liberty said, “as much as 15 feet below the bottom of the channel in the center line.’’
Once the bore is dug, crews will insert high-density polyethylene conduits — two 10-inch tubes for electrical lines and an 8-inch for fiber optics, which the city can one day lease to a telecommunications company.
One of the electrical conduits will house the 24-kilovolt lines, to be installed next spring in a separate project; the other will be a spare.
City officials say the roughly 90-day project will improve the electrical feed to the casino complex and other destinations on the barrier island.
The work is expected to end in November, a week or two before Thanksgiving.
Here’s how the work will affect the public.
Crews arrived in Bryant Park on Thursday, Aug. 20, to start unloading equipment.
On Friday, Aug. 21, crews started to install fencing around designated work areas in South Bryant Park.
At the beach
The barrier island bore pit will take up nearly 80 beach parking spots. Some residential permit spaces are being relocated just west of their current location. No handicapped spaces will be blocked.
The beach parking lot is already being impacted by an unrelated project that started in July, the installation of modular buildings for lifeguards and maintenance on the hill south of the shuttered casino swimming pool.
“There will be some challenges trying to make this work,’’ Interim City Manager Troy Perry said earlier this summer, refering to both projects.
Free weekend Shuttle
A free shuttle will run from the City Hall parking lot to the beach on Saturdays, Sundays and Labor Day Monday, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. when the parking lot is expected to be full.
In Bryant Park
The mainland bore pit will be in the middle of Bryant Park, south of the boat ramp and jetty, between Second Avenue South and Third Avenue South. It will require fencing off the middle of the narrow park south to Fourth Avenue South, the staging area for conduit pieces that will be fused together as the plastic pipe is pulled across the underwater tunnel in 800-foot sections.
“The space that’s needed to do the drilling and pull the conduit is massive,’’ said David Martyniuk, the city’s assistant director of engineering.
The eastern strip of South Bryant Park along the main waterfront walkway and the south end of the park will remain open to the public.
Work hours
The contractor has been asked to work from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Friday, but weekend work and night work may be needed if weather affects the progress.
Other details highlighted on the project webpage:
Drilling operations will generate normal construction-level noise.
Drilling produces relatively low, continuous vibration from the drill string rotating and the cutting head moving through soil and rock.
Temporary lights will be used if night work is required. Lights will be positioned to point away from residential areas, streets and the beach.
Once the work is done, the contractor will restore Bryant Park and the beach parking lot to their pre-project condition.
During a presentation at City Hall on July 21, City Commissioner Sarah Malega said she was disappointed the work couldn’t be completed before the end of summer to eliminate potential impacts on tourist season.
“A couple of storms, and all of a sudden Nov. 20 is turning into Dec. 1,’’ she said.
Liberty said the work might have started earlier but the city had to put the project out to bid twice before hiring LaBelle-based Accurate Drilling Systems for $1.46 million in April.
He said crews will do their best to reduce public impacts.
“We could be out of the parking lot quicker than we can be out of the park,’’ he said. “The goal is to be out of those 80 spots long before Nov. 20.’’
The parking lot will be disrupted again after tourist season when crews return in the spring to pull the cable through the conduit.
At a project presentation in April, Liberty felt compelled to point out that the drilling work was not being done to prepare for any future commercial developments at the beach.
A month earlier, city voters overwhelmingly rejected a charter change that would have made it easier for commercial development with long-term leases at the beach.
The drilling project, Liberty told city commissioners, “is really to reinforce the infrastructure that supports that beach complex, which is quite old and is in question.’’
“This has nothing to do with preparing for any massive (commercial) project,’’ he said. “It’s what we have to do to power the infrastructure we have at the beach as it exists today.’’
For more information, click here to visit the city’s dedicated project webpage.