The in basket: Robert Sherwood of Bremerton e-mails to say, “I see drilling equipment in operation next to the railroad bridge in Gorst. Soil samples, I assume.
“Is a new railroad bridge in the plans for more lanes of traffic for Highway 3? The backups cannot be tolerated anymore because of this 1940’s era bridge.”
The out basket: The backups will have to be tolerated longer. The work Robert sees is a project to bore a hole beneath the railroad tracks through which the final piece of a sewer line will be run.
The sewer line will link new homes on Anderson Hill on the other side of Gorst to the Bremerton sewer plant. All the green pipe we were seeing alongside Highway 3 last winter, now all underground, was part of that work.
Project Engineer Brad Ginn of the city said the boring job as been stalled by a series of large rocks that have required the contractor, D&D Boring, to send men into the casing to do hand mining. They are about two-thirds of the way through and hope to find easier material to bore through. But “the last 30 feet have been constant rock,” he said.
The work is hard to spot, because even those workers not in the casing are down in the hole that accesses it.
The widening of Highway 3 from Gorst to Bremerton, which would require a new railroad bridge, was one recommendation of a corridor study just completed this spring. But that’s advanced planning and any work would be years, if not decades, away.
They must be planning on being there a while, I drove by the other day and noticed they put a Mail Box there, with the drilling companies name on it.