The Central Kitsap Community Council queried Kitsap County officials and the SWD manager at a recent meeting about the roads.
SWD general manager Morgan Johnson said all of the new pipes will be installed and connected along Silverdale Way, Bucklin Hill Road, Anderson Hill Road, Randall Way and Old Frontier Road around the end of January. But road work still remains to be done.
“It’s rough but it’s drivable,” Johnson said of the roads. The road work is not yet complete and workers often have to dig into a road more than once as part of the construction process, and thus they have not yet finalized the roads.
The roads should be “permanently” patched by March.
Johnson said water mains, pipes for reclaimed water and electrical conduit totaling around 40,000 feet in length would be installed when the project is complete.
“I think it’s one of the largest utility projects that has taken place in replacing pipe in Kitsap County. It’s a lot of work,” Johnson said.
The new mains replace aging, failure-prone asbestos-and-concrete mains, Johnson said.
Tina Nelson with Kitsap County Public Works said the roads were in good structural shape but won’t be “pretty” because of all the patches. At some point the road will need to be completely reconstructed. But until then construction crews are using temporary patches to keep the roads serviceable. Better weather is needed for a more permanent application of asphalt.
“It’s not going to be perfect until we’ve got good weather,” Nelson said, noting that the water district wanted to do the work right.
“If we try to do something permanent now it isn’t going to be good: it’s cold, it’s wet, it’s dark, you’re just not going to get a very good product.
“We’re checking that (road quality) is maintained to a reasonable level, but that doesn’t mean you’re not going to find potholes.”
The standard, Nelson said, was that the road should have a smooth, level finish that supports the speed limit of the roadway.
Johnson said wintertime was not the best time for laying down asphalt.
“You cannot just start up an asphalt plant and start producing asphalt. They have to have a demand. It’s expensive to start up an asphalt plant,” Johnson said.
The contractor has been trucking asphalt from Port Angeles and Tacoma, and the asphalt cools during the trip which makes it less effective when applied to the road.
In response to a question posed by someone at the meeting, Jon Brand with Kitsap County said area roads were not at all like the high-quality Autobahn in Germany.
“Here in Kitsap County a lot of the roads that you drive on were originally built in like the 1800s. They’re territorial roads and they just kind of grow over time,” Brand said.
“Sometimes we dig into those roads and there’s no telling what you might find. There may be old stumps • or when they built the roads they went through wet spots so they would just fill the wet spots with logs and then build the road over it. So it’s not like an Autobahn.”
Old building foundations have been found incorporated into county roads before, Johnson said.
Grander issues than road repairs will be discussed at the next Central Kitsap Community Council meeting when the council looks at the Silverdale Sub-Area Plan. That meeting is Thursday, Jan. 15 from 7-9 p.m. at the Silverdale Beach Hotel, 3073 NW Bucklin Hill Road.
