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CHARLESTOWN – Charlestown businesses say they have been hit hard by the closure of Highway 12 south of the city since early August, with a noticeable drop in the number of normal customers, and some are wondering if Concord officials are doing all they can to reopen the national road. .
“It has slowed down foot traffic here,” said Jan Bailey, owner of Depot Home Center on Main Street. “A lot of our customers (from the south) don’t come here. They go to the competition.
Bailey’s comment has been echoed by others who depend on the flow of cars along the main north-south highway between Claremont and Keene on the New Hampshire side of the Connecticut River.
Bailey said that sometimes Charlestown feels like a ghost town when you can look both north and south on Main Street and there may not be a car in sight. “Before, you always had to wait before shooting,” Bailey said.
The issue with a 600-foot section of road is also forcing Charlestown students attending Fall Mountain Regional High School to take a detour over dirt roads, which could become a problem in the winter.
The road closure from the north begins at the intersection of Almar and Main streets just south of downtown Charlestown, but motorists are advised to take the Interstate 91 detour at more than one mile north of the business district. At the south end, the road is closed from a little north of the intersection of roads 12 and 12A.
Gary Stoddard, owner of Ralph’s supermarket on Main Street, has also seen a decline in business.
“We have lost so much traffic,” Stoddard said. “We used to have a lot of people from the north or south through town and they would stop, but now they take the highway before they even get to town. Basically, they bypass the city center.
Across from Ralph’s Main Street is a game and hobby store, Cobb and Co. LLC, which opened in 2019.
“It’s bad,” said owner Joseph Cobb, when asked about the decline in business. “I would say we have lost 90% of our customers by car. We can clearly see the impact on in-store traffic.
The road was closed after a severe rainstorm in late July that rolled down the slope of the railroad embankment a few meters to the east, overflowed a drainage area, and flooded Highway 12. The runoff washed away. compromised the slope to the west of the road, causing the southbound track to collapse, said Jason Ayotte, project engineer at the state Department of Transportation.
A second factor in road failure was an increase in the size of the “voids” under a concrete slab about six inches below the roadway. Ayotte said the unusually high rainfall in July saturated the soil and increased groundwater, washing away the loamy and sandy soil and enlarging the voids over time.
“The voids under the slab have packed the road,” he added.
A temporary solution to open at least one lane has been suggested by Albert St. Pierre, co-owner of St. Pierre Sand and Gravel in Charlestown.
“In my world – 40 years of doing this – you take the guardrail off, haul 8,000 yards of gravel so it won’t slide, then dig that and put four feet of gravel in here and pave it and have that stretch reopened.” said Saint-Pierre, standing on the closed section of the road recently. “I could do it in two weeks.”
Ayotte said the proximity to the railroad tracks, which is about 20 feet above the road, means DOT crews cannot work on the road until the railroad backfill is cleared. stabilized.
“The road acts as a buttress holding the railroad embankment in place,” Ayotte said. “During our geotechnical analysis, we discovered that any removal of the pavement would actually compromise the track. This is therefore a very risky situation as it could lead to further failure of the railway line. The simple rock would not stabilize the embankment.
The best estimates for reopening the road are at the end of winter, as the railway embankment needs to be stabilized before road work can begin, Ayotte said.
Ayotte said a complicated process called “building soil nail walls” is designed to stabilize the backfill and will take six to eight weeks to complete.
“It allows us to do top-down construction,” Ayotte said. “It’s a better way to do it without affecting the floodplain or wetlands. ”
Ayotte said they will drill holes in the backfill and insert steel rods every five feet for about 400 feet and grout them in place. The edge of the rods will have a wire mesh, turned with concrete, to create a wall and lock everything in place. A second row of rods will be inserted five feet deep so that the wall, which will have a trapezoidal shape – wider at the top than at the bottom – will be 10 feet deep. “Specialty contractors will be needed to do this work,” he said.
DOT has contacted several nail contractors and Ayotte said he was “confident” that they will be available in November and December when construction slows down.
Ayotte said DOT officials got together and handed plans and information to the railroad on Monday and also posted announcements about the project on its “tender” website.
“It’s really complicated with the railroad,” he said. “We didn’t realize the extent of the damage and how bad the ground conditions were. We expected a traditional embankment repair.
The preliminary cost estimate for repairing the national road is between $ 3 million and $ 3.5 million, Ayotte said.
Tom Ciuba, vice president of communications for the railroad owner, Genesee & Wyoming Railroad of Darien, Connecticut, said in an email Friday that the railroad, which runs two to four freight trains a day on the tracks in addition to dual-day Amtrak service, is working with the state to expedite repair work
“The New England Central Railroad recognizes that Route 12 is an essential route for the community and as such is doing our part to move the project forward as safely and quickly as possible,” Ciuba said. “We have granted contractors access to our right-of-way next to the highway until the end of November and we plan to review an updated project concept next week.”
Some in town have questioned whether the state is doing everything it can to reopen the road and wonder if everything will go faster if the damaged road is on the other side of the state, near the most populated areas.
“I don’t blame the state for what happened, but I blame it for its inaction,” said Bob Beaudry, owner of a Charlestown trucking company, Beaudry Enterprises. “All I’m trying to do is cross state, if it was on any other state highway, maybe it’ll be sooner.”
The Beaudry company, which also has a fertilizer plant in North Walpole, frequently uses Route 12 with its trucks carrying construction, agricultural and other materials. Drivers now have to use narrow, winding side roads to get around the closure or Interstate 91, which adds time and costs to every trip. As an example, Beaudry said a return trip to Marlborough, New Hampshire is valued at $ 300.
“Now it takes 40 more minutes per charge. That’s 40 times three (loads per day). Who is going to pay for this? I can’t just charge more. Route 12 is an important stretch of road for this city. I think they might come up with some sort of band-aid.
Fall Mountain Regional School District School Board member Alyssa Bascom said she was not sure state officials fully understand the impact of the road closure.
“It affects everyone who lives in Charlestown, works or lives in Walpole or works in Claremont,” Bascom said. “It’s very disturbing for high school. This (600 foot section) is a tiny little piece, but it is changing the life of every person right now.
To catch the Charlestown Student Bus to Langdon High School, four buses need an additional 10 minutes to travel Acworth Road then South Hemlock Road to Langdon, where it turns into dirt.
“These are pretty narrow little roads,” Bascom said. “It really affected Charlestown and access to high school.”
Arthur Lufkin, transportation manager for the school district, said they were considering using the freeway but it added more than 30 minutes to the high school trip. Additionally, Lufkin said he believes students travel safer at slower speeds on back roads in the winter than they would do more than 50mph on the highway when black ice can appear out of nowhere. . “It’s more dangerous.”
Back on Main Street, another business owner said the closure had put small retail businesses in a “dead end.”
“Are we going to get there?” Yes. But our traffic is half of what it should be, ”said Dan Pelkey, owner of Dan’s Max Saver, a discount and tool store. “I guess all businesses on both sides of this incident are feeling it.”
Ayotte said the DOT is moving forward as fast as it can and that offers will be due within seven days of the announcement to speed up the process, less than the usual three weeks.
“We are certainly working hard,” he said. “The team are struggling with complicated ground conditions and it has been a big challenge with so many people involved. We certainly feel sorry for the community as it cannot be easy to make a detour of this magnitude. ”
Patrick O’Grady can be reached at [email protected].
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