The process of developing a plan for the Haines Borough’s deteriorating Lutak Dock is slowly moving forward, with the municipality last week asking interested firms to contact the borough detailing their experience, references and ideas for a yet-undefined repair or replacement project.
Meanwhile, the dock’s facilities continue to show signs of wear and tear. On July 9, borough employees found an air leak on the roll-on/roll-off dock, the mechanism used for transferring freight off barges. The roll-on/roll-off dock uses an air bladder to adjust its height to accommodate vessels of varying sizes, and the bladder’s leak was causing the dock to sink.
”It’s an old thing and it’s suffering,” said interim public facilities director Brian Lemcke. “(The hole) was big enough to allow the thing to lose its air pressure and sink dangerously low.”
Harbormaster Shawn Bell temporarily patched the leak, which Lemcke said was a prudent move but not a solution.
“That’s not a very good way to address something like that. If it failed even worse, there would be a danger of that whole thing sinking,” he said.
Bell said the borough is working with Western Marine, the company currently working on the state’s ferry terminal project, to discuss possible solutions, a timeline and a cost.
In addition to being on-hand to potentially fix the roll-on/roll-off dock, Western Marine’s presence is benefiting the borough in other ways, said manager David Sosa.
For one, as part of the borough’s agreement with the state Department of Transportation, the construction company has removed two failing cells on the borough’s end of the dock to preserve the state’s investment in its own cells.
Another benefit of the state’s work is the borough has gained a much better understanding of the structural integrity of the cells, including some of the challenges of deconstructing them, Sosa said.
Because of the strength the cells showed in some areas, Sosa said it is worth exploring if there is value in putting up a wall in front of the dock and shoring up the existing structure instead of totaling demolishing it and replacing it. A firm could possibly excavate an area behind the cell, fill it with concrete, and then anchor the wall to the stable concrete, he said.
“I think where we are right now is: take what we’ve learned from the state construction out there and the benefits we got out of that – which was them taking down two of our cells and saving us the demolition cost of that – and now applying the knowledge they gained to other potential options. It could be that we could do something to shore up (the existing structure) based on what they saw – as opposed to tearing everything down – and that could be a significant difference in the cost of the project,” Sosa said.
Sosa still has a discretionary budget of $100,000 for work on the Lutak Dock project, an amount Sosa requested and the assembly approved in February. In a rough outline of how the money might be spent, Sosa listed trips to other docks and an update of the 2012 Northern Economics study that looked at prospective dock customers.
Sosa said those items – the trips and the study – dropped in priority as the borough gradually received more information about the state’s fiscal situation and the declining price of oil.
Public facilities director Lemcke said dropping those items in priority seemed to be the general consensus at the last meeting of the manager’s Lutak Dock working group, which met about six or seven weeks ago.
“They kind of backed up and decided maybe we don’t have to spend this money on visits and stuff,” Lemcke said.
Right now, the borough is focused on keeping the dock safe with temporary fixes while it waits for the results of the Request for Qualifications, which it issued last week, Sosa said.
The request asks the applying company to provide, in addition to its qualifications and history, a “proposed project budget with breakdown of personnel costs, reimbursable expenses and other costs.”
“(We) put that out there so other engineering firms can submit some ideas, give us their information on their abilities, we can review that, and then we can select a few firms and bring them out here and say, ‘Take a look at this. Give us some ideas on how you would address the problems,’” Sosa said.
Submissions are due Aug. 28.