By Janet Stoica

It began many months ago and feels like it won’t ever be finished for many more months to come. The never-ending construction, reconstruction, and rebuilding of one of the main travel arteries in town seems like Webster’s own version of Boston’s Big Dig. The utility company opens up deep road canyons to install new gas piping, neatly covers the ravine up, and asphalts over it. Two weeks later, the same area is excavated again and recovered. 

The road has been scarred, beaten, and rolled over by backhoes, heavy dump trucks, trailers, and thousands of passenger vehicles in the never-ending saga of placement of new water and utility piping. Poor Mother Earth! All this for the convenience of us who need water, sewer, and utilities! As one of the main thoroughfares for the municipality, townies cannot help but use the maligned street even though it’s a ride on the worst roadway they’ve ever experienced. Your teeth jangle, your vehicle’s contents shake, rattle, and roll, and expletives galore escape your lips as you navigate the feisty and ugly tarmac of bumps, lumps, and dips. We should consider ourselves “lucky” to be allowed to use the street after its daily divoting and during its beauty treatment.

Its reconstruction has been a necessary evil. According to Webster’s Water & Sewer Superintendent, Tom Cutler, the project should be wrapping up soon. “It’s a combo-project of replacing old water pipes and gas lines that began in 2021,” he said. When Superintendent Cutler joined the town’s water and sewer department in July 2021, the project had already begun. According to the town website the project is part of the American Rescue Plan Act (“ARPA”) and will replace 4,300 linear feet of 12- and 16-inch cast iron water piping with new ductile iron pipe from South Main Street to Emerald Avenue including replacement of hydrants, valves, service connections, trench repair, and appurtenant work. The fall should see the project’s completion along with road repaving. “We’ll have to go through a 90-day settlement of road trenches and then repaving should begin,” said Mr. Cutler.

Other town projects include work on the Bigelow Road and Memorial Beach wells for PFA’s (Per-and Polyfluoroalkyl Substance “PFAs6”) including estimated constructions costs; water main work on North Main Street; and aeration work at the wastewater treatment plant. “We’re being proactive and hope to avoid government mandates. We’re in good shape with our PFAs limits as Webster began its action last year,” stated Mr. Cutler, “and with rule changes this year, we hope to get PFA funding.” 

Another consideration that concerns our Superintendent is the residual sludge at our treatment plant. The sludge is transported to a special incinerator in Woonsocket RI but the facility is aging. Many area communities are equally as dependent with the one facility for their sludge so if Woonsocket goes down, we’re in trouble, as other similar plants aren’t accepting new customers.   

Fie to the first jackhammer that touches the new Lake Street roadway once it’s had a new and final coat of asphalt. You can hear the groans from here to Boston “Isn’t it nice that they’ve decided to rip open newly-paved Lake Street again?”