Costs, Inconveniences Multiply for Pacific Coast Highway Sewer Work

What started as a nine-month job to repair a stretch of sewer line in Santa Monica under Pacific Coast Highway has become a monumental task that is $12.4 million over its original $9.7-million budget and, officials predict, will span nearly three years.

Construction will create traffic bottlenecks through Santa Monica for months, causing delays for beach goers and commuters and complicating access for coastal homeowners. An estimated 75,000 cars pass through that corridor each day.

From October to May for the next two years, PCH’s usual three lanes will be reduced to two in each direction for about a mile north of the California Incline, and access to the highway from Santa Monica’s streets will be restricted.

The project’s goal is to replace 8,000 feet of the earthquake-damaged sewer line at the city’s north end that had outlived its capacity and was at risk of a catastrophic break. But it has been plagued by holdups and legal threats since it started last fall.

And there has been an unusual accident. In May, drilling crews hit a rock layer where they expected only sand, inadvertently embedding a giant drill bit underground.

Then Caltrans halted work for the tourist-heavy summer and the hole was temporarily paved over. Soon, a German-made micro-tunneling machine will dig out the drilling machinery, which is lodged near Santa Monica’s northern border.

“To some extent, this is a learning process for all of us,” said the city’s project manager, Jack Schroeder.

Santa Monica Mayor Ken Genser explained: “It’s not a pleasant experience for anybody. It’s certainly making life more difficult.”

Commuters and beachside homeowners blame the city for misjudging the location of the rock layer and snarling traffic for months longer than originally planned.

Dov Paz, who manages Perry’s cafe and bicycle and skate rental place on PCH adjacent to the repair site near the California Incline, estimated that business will drop 70% during construction.

Last winter was like “a war zone,” he said. “You couldn’t see the beach from the road.”

UCLA student Adam Barenfeld, 25, commutes from Westwood to the beach every weekday to work with Paz. He dreads the next two winters of what he said would be gridlock.

“It’s unbelievable,” he said. “To Westwood is an hour one way. This is normally a 15-minute drive.”

Within about two weeks, crews will resume laying the new sewer line, which will hook up to an El Segundo treatment plant. The project will serve more than 140,000 people in Santa Monica, Pacific Palisades and Los Angeles.

The new line “will result in substantial cleanup of Santa Monica Bay,” Schroeder said.

The Pacific Coast Highway project, estimated to cost $22.1 million, is the most expensive portion of Santa Monica’s wider, $130-million effort to repair lines throughout the beach-side city damaged during the Northridge earthquake.

But it isn’t the only portion of the sewer replacement job that is over budget and behind schedule.

The Moss Avenue Pumping Station, a compact building next to the Santa Monica Pier, is $300,000 over budget and six months behind schedule.

Repairs to the line under Neilson Way, the Santa Monica thoroughfare that runs parallel to the beach, are $2.4-million over budget and six months late in completion.

Officials say the causes of such delays include Victorian-era railroad ties, which had to be removed, and an abundance of abandoned underground utility wires.

Engineers have reconfigured the PCH traffic route in hopes of satisfying angry locals, who say the current plan restricts access to their homes.

But attorney Chuck Levy, president of the Palisades Beach Property Owners Assn., the group of homeowners suing the state and Santa Monica over the project, said Caltrans has agreed to the changes only tentatively and no promises were made.

“The end is nowhere in sight. . . . Caltrans appears to be accountable to no one,” he said.

Caltrans officials dispute the criticism, saying their job is to ensure safety and traffic flow on what is one of the most heavily traveled highways in the nation.

“It’s kind of a tight spot between the needs of the project and the needs of the traveling public,” said Jim Fowler, the Caltrans engineer overseeing the project.

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Pacific Coast Tie-Up

Portions of Santa Monica’s massive sewer replacement project are expected to bottleneck traffic on surface streets and along Pacific Coast Highway periodically through 2002.