RUMFORD — Eight weeks of work to repair the June 8 Prospect Avenue sewer failure problem is nearing an end.

But it will take a month or so before the backfilled dig site is paved and the street made whole again.

“It’s coming good,” Andy Russell, Public Works superintendent, said Tuesday afternoon. “We’re almost done. We’re letting it all settle for a while and we’ll pave it later.”

The problem began June 8 with a sinkhole in the road about 10 feet by 15 feet and a foot deep. It was expected to be a two-day job at most to replace the failed pipe section and broken manhole.

But when the crew started excavating to determine where the dirt went it learned the pipe section and manhole were within a huge aquifer more than 18 feet below street level.

They couldn’t reach it because of the abnormal volume of water and sandy soil in the dig site that kept collapsing toward the trench cage.

All along, Russell said it would be a two-day job if they could only drain the work site long enough to replace the broken pipe and manhole that were installed during the 1960s or 1970s under former U.S. Route 2.

“Not this past weekend, but the weekend before, we had a new group come in and do a better job on the de-watering end of it,” Russell said.

An estimated 1,100 gallons per minute was pumped from the site, he said.

“And within like in a day and a half, on Monday morning, it was de-watered enough,” Russell said.

The crew began laying pipe and installing a new manhole.

“By the second day, we had all the pipe done and were backfilling,” Russell said. “It only took us two days once we got the water out. Everything went in fine.

“We’re just smoothing up the gravel right now and we’re taking care of what we had contaminated for soil for (Eric) Davis and the neighbors.”

Town officials acknowledged July 6 that raw sewage was pumped from the site of the sewer-pipe replacement project onto Davis’ land and through a culvert under Route 2 that drains into the Androscoggin River.

At the time, Davis said he feared pollutants from the sewage would get into the nectar of wildflowers that his hives of 80,000 honeybees tap.

Davis complained about the illegal dumping to the Maine Department of Environmental Protection, which began an investigation.

That’s still in the correspondence stage. Russell said the town has until Friday, Aug. 3, to clarify its initial statements to DEP.

The line carries sewage from a nursing home down Eaton Hill Road to join the Prospect Avenue line that carries sewage from Rumford Center to the Mexico sewage treatment plant.

Town Manager Carlo Puiia said Tuesday morning that the DEP thought the town crew had pumped nothing but raw sewage onto the land. That wasn’t the case, he and Russell said.

“It was mostly groundwater,” Puiia said, estimating it at 90 percent groundwater and 10 percent raw sewage.

At the time, the crew was trying to drain the hole to find the broken pipe, so the mix of sewage, water and sand was pumped onto the land for about two hours each on two days rather than down the sewer pipe where it could create more problems, Russell said July 6.

“I can’t tell you exactly how much, probably 90 percent, but I don’t feel it was as much sewage as anybody else was saying it was,” Russell said.

“Hopefully, we can get this all hashed out, figure out how much we did.  We’ve been cleaning off that sand and sediment that got washed down onto his wildflower area.”

To alleviate similar future problems with the sewer pipe and provide better flow, Russell wants to reline it with cured-in-place pipe lining.

“That will make a big difference with the integrity of the pipe,” he said.

“It’s one smooth continuous pipe, so you don’t have the joints and anything, and infiltration, and all that going on.”

That work can be done from manhole to manhole rather than digging it all back up, Russell said.

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