Repairs to one of the areas hit hardest by the spring’s devastating flooding will begin soon in Fairhope, after the City Council awarded nearly $260,000 in emergency contracts. The council approved the contracts on the night of Monday, June 9, 2014, with the federal government expected to cover the majority of the cost.
The damage traced back to an April storm that dumped upwards of 20 inches of rain on south Baldwin County. The deluge washed out a portion of a gully that runs alongside Fairhope’s sewer treatment plant on North Section Street, damaging a section of roadway and eroding nearby bluffs.
Engineering and construction contracts
With state and federal emergency declarations in place, the council moved to line up the work. It hired the Daphne firm Hutchinson, Moore & Rauch for $37,000 to engineer a repair plan and put the project out to bid. According to Scott Hutchinson of the firm, five companies received bid packets, and the lowest and only bidder was Spanish Fort-based Ammons & Blackmon Construction, which was awarded the contract.
The project was divided into two parts, each with federal support. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service agreed to cover 75 percent of the $192,696.80 cost to rehabilitate the gully erosion near the sewer plant, with the city responsible for the remainder. The Federal Emergency Management Agency agreed to cover 75 percent of the $66,520.20 needed to repair the gully area near the damaged stretch of North Section Street, just north of the Fairhope Colony Cemetery, with the state and city splitting the remaining quarter.
A second front near U.S. 98
The storm damage extended beyond the sewer plant. FEMA representatives told city officials the agency also wanted to move quickly on replacing a gravity sewer line that washed out under U.S. 98 along Fly Creek, near the Publix shopping center.
Toward that end, the council on Monday night hired the firm Preble-Rish, at a cost of $44,760, to engineer plans to replace the old sewer line and to design a new lift station on the east side of U.S. 98. The line had been patched with a temporary fix in the aftermath of the storm. The estimated cost of the new lift station was $325,640, pointing to significant additional spending ahead as the city worked through the full scope of the storm’s damage.
Recovering from a punishing storm
The April storm ranked among the most destructive weather events to strike the region in recent memory, and Fairhope was among the communities that bore the brunt of it. The combination of intense rainfall and the area’s characteristic bluffs and gullies made erosion a central concern, threatening roads, utilities and the treatment plant that handles the city’s wastewater.
The heavy reliance on federal reimbursement reflected both the scale of the damage and the value of the emergency declarations, which unlocked USDA and FEMA support to shoulder most of the repair costs. For Fairhope taxpayers, that federal participation meant the city’s share of the immediate repairs would be a fraction of the total.
With the engineering and construction contracts in hand, officials expected work to move forward on stabilizing the gully near the sewer plant and repairing the roadway along North Section Street. The parallel effort to replace the failed sewer line under U.S. 98 signaled that the city’s storm recovery would continue for months, as temporary fixes gave way to permanent infrastructure.