PRESQUE ISLE, Maine — A hundred-foot stretch of Parsons Street has been a pain for the Maine DOT for a number of years and some commuters are wondering if the sagging road will ever be fixed.
“We’ve had a problem with subsidence there for decades and it’s going to be quite expensive to fix things,” said Maine DOT Engineer Brent Bubar, referring to the gradual sinking of land under the road in that area. “We’ve tried some things that just didn’t work.”
Safety concerns prompted the DOT to install automatic traffic lights to control traffic and turn that section of road into one lane earlier this year, he said.
“We started developing a plan to fix it about three years ago using a geotechnical engineer consultant. We have a plan to address it fully and now that plan got accelerated when we started seeing the subsidence we saw this spring,” Bubar said.
Engineering consultants hired by the DOT expressed concerns that just filling the gap with more material would make the situation worse.
“There’s a combination of frost susceptible soils, which basically wick water through them, and water running under there,” Bubar said. “As time goes on, basically it’s washing out the material and it keeps dropping and when the soils get wet they have less strength, so they start to slump.”
To try to do a permanent fix this year would have probably cost 50 percent more than it will the way the DOT is handling it, Bubar said.
“We saw that what we could do there by closing down a lane was possible,” he said. “It isn’t Route 1 between Caribou and Presque Isle or going to Houlton, where we couldn’t do something like that, so we took the time to save the money and within a week or two we are going to be setting up a temporary road for the winter and next year we will be building a permanent fix.”
The temporary fix for this winter is expected to cost up to $70,000 with the permanent project to begin next spring at a price of close to $1 million.
“We could have easily made this a couple million dollars if we had tried to accelerate things, but it just didn’t seem like that had to happen,” Bubar said.
As part of the temporary fix later this year, the traffic lights will be removed and the road will be diverted a little to allow for two lanes of travel.
“In order to do the temporary fix we have to stay within the right of way, and long term we want to go a little further, so it’s not like it’s a complete waste of money because we’re headed that way anyway,” Bubar said.
The permanent fix project will be put out to bid over the winter.
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- Safety concerns about the land deteriorating under Parsons Street in Presque Isle prompted the Maine Department of Transportation earlier this year to install automatic traffic lights to control traffic and turn a section of the road into one lane. On Aug. 27, a message someone tacked onto a road sign at the site indicated that the traffic lights had been up for 112 days and that no roadwork had been done in that time. An engineer with the DOT, however, says a fix is on the way. (Joshua Archer)
