Hundreds of failing manhole covers vex Cd'A drivers, challenge city's streets department

COEUR d'ALENE — When he drives to work on his usual route, Jim Hammond swerves in the usual places.

That is because as Coeur d'Alene city administrator, Hammond knows, almost without looking, the location of manholes on Seventh Street. He was informed of their presence through the thump and bump of driving over them, and like many Lake City motorists, he finds the jolts unappealing.

“We have a number of manholes that are either high or they are low,” Hammond said. “I avoid them.”

Sunken or protruding manhole covers, the holes and hills they make as the surrounding pavement and the fill underneath sinks or swells, is not, however, something the city can avoid.

Messed-up manholes monopolize the city road department's time, especially in the spring.

“Every year the department spends four to six weeks repairing manholes,” streets and engineering manager Tim Martin said.

The failing covers are a time suck and a costly fix, but utility project manager Mike Becker thinks he may have found a solution to the manhole cover quandary.

He plans to take a page from the book of Lewiston's city streets department this summer with a pilot project to repair a dozen manhole covers using a round, as opposed to a diamond-cut fix.

The round hole repair system called a “Mr. Manhole” leveling system uses a cutting tool that attaches to a Bobcat, cuts out the pavement around a manhole chimney, removes and replaces it with tight-fitted seal made of quick-setting concrete, collars, rebar and sealant.

The fix takes minutes as compared to the several hours required in the diamond-cut method the city has used without a lot of success for many years until now.

And the result of the round-cut system is a level street.

“I personally think Mike is onto something here,” Martin told City Council members at a Monday presentation to the three-member General Services Committee.

“We don't have the technology to deal with the square cuts,” he said.

The square- or diamond-cut system requires compacting fill around the circular chimney top. The fill is responsible for the heave-ho the round-cut system is supposed to eliminate.

Approximately 10 percent of the city's 4,534 sewer manhole covers must be addressed Becker said.

“There are probably 450 to 500 that are in dire need of adjustment,” he said.

He estimated using the Mr. Manhole system, the city could fix 150 manhole covers per year instead of the 40 that it now adjusts, or fixes, annually.

This summer's pilot project, which is set to repair 12 covers at a cost of between $1,000 and $2,500 each, will be watched by more than a half-dozen neighboring cities' street departments, including those in Sandpoint, Moscow and Spokane.

“We've all got the same problems,” Becker said.

Expanding and contracting pavement and the cracked streets — called alligatoring — that it causes is a bane to street departments, and to motorists who swerve to avoid the sewer manhole covers over Coeur d'Alene's 216 miles of sewer network.

One of the Ramsey Road chimneys collapsed this spring, Becker said, dropping the manhole cover down the chimney hole and sending the rim 60 feet down the road during rush-hour traffic.

“Luckily no one ran into it,” before crews arrived, he said.

His enthusiasm for the new fix has spread through the city's streets and utility departments.

“I think of it as a labor-saver,” Martin said. “It's a great thing.”