So, who’s going to pay for that? County, canal district talk road repairs

QUINCY — As work crews with Tommer Construction rebuilt and shored up the banks of an irrigation canal that collapsed last Friday with resulting floods washing out a section of Frenchman Hills Road, officials with Grant County and the Quincy Columbia Basin Irrigation District met Thursday morning to consider three very important questions.

When will the segment of the road be rebuilt? How much will it cost? Who is going to pay for it?

“The reason why I was asking these is because of the mobilization costs that we would incur,” said Grant County Director of Public Works Sam Castro as he stood on Frenchman Hills Road not far from where the canal breach occurred.

“I see equipment here that could be utilized to restore the road,” he continued, looking toward the Tommer crews at work in the distance. “So there’s going to be some discussions that take place between now and next week.”

Portions of a feeder canal supplying water to roughly 15,000 acres in the southern reaches of the Quincy Columbia Basin Irrigation District gave way early Friday morning in several places along Frenchman Hills Road between Dodson Road and Road I SW, carving large flood channels through the Grant County sand and washing out a portion of the roadway.

“This is a critical corridor. If we don’t get it restored, farmers are going to be calling and asking when will this be restored,” Garza said.

Garza explained that an emergency declaration from the Grant County Commission on Friday allows the county to contract for the road’s reconstruction without having to seek competitive bids. However, as important as Frenchman Hills Road is for local farmers, the road is not considered very important by the federal government, so there’s no obvious federal funding to do the work.

“It allows us to work with the Department of Emergency Management at the state level in hopes that there was some funding for the projects and the damage sustained,” Garza said.

Garza said he did not have an estimate for repairing and rebuilding Frenchman Hills Road, and expected to be able to present that to commissioners Cindy Carter, Danny Stone and Rob Jones on Monday. However, Garza said there might be State Department of Transportation funds, but the state’s emergency fund may have been exhausted by last year’s wildfires.

Roger Sonnichsen, secretary manager of the QCBID, said his agency is not authorized to do any work outside the canal easements. He also explained that while the district maintains and operates the canals, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation owns all of the infrastructure in the Columbia Basin Project.

“Everything is owned by (the Bureau of) Reclamation, but we operate it and maintain it,” he said.

Sonnichsen said the breach was caused when a water sensor failed and misread water levels in the canal.

“We were not getting a true reading of the water level,” Sonnichsen said.

Three irrigation districts — the Quincy Columbia Basin Irrigation District, the East Columbia Basin Irrigation District, and the Columbia Irrigation District — were formed under state law in the 1940s to distribute Columbia River water to farmers in the Basin made available by the construction of Coulee Dam. According to Sonnichsen, the districts really belong to the farmers who buy the water.

“We don’t have any federal monies either,” Sonnichsen said. “We have a 30% reserve of funds for emergencies.”

And for the time being, any claims for reimbursement of construction costs will be handled by the QCBID and its insurer, Sonnichsen explained.

“So if you haven’t seen or received a claim form from us, you should get that from us,” he said.

Sonnichsen said QCBID crews and Tommer Construction crews have been shoring up the canal bank and looking for any other problems since Friday.

“I was on the digger until 8 p.m.,” said Chris Tommer, president of Tommer Construction.

Tommer said his crews could get to work on the road as soon as they are finished repairing the canal.

While Sonnichsen said QCBID is still on track to prime and fill the affected canals in two weeks, Commissioner Jones wondered if the breach revealed anything else about the canal.

“Do these failure spots create weakness anywhere else on the canal that you’re going to be worried about in the future,” Jones asked.

“We’re assessing now. We’re fixing all the weak spots,” Sonnichsen said in answer to Jones’s question..

Susan Kovich, an engineer with Nicholas Kovich Engineering, currently under contract to provide engineering services to Grant County, said about 2,100 feet of Frenchman Hills Road has been damaged. Everything from the washout will require complete rebuilding of the roadbed and road due to rushing water eroding the north shoulder of the roadway and collapsing portions of the shoulder.

In addition, Kovich said county and district officials needed to look at the silt levels in the Frenchman Hills Wasteway, which handled much of the floodwater from the breach, especially in the culverts under Dodson Road, to ensure the road doesn’t flood in the next heavy rain.

“We’d also recommended ground-penetrating radar, basically just going over the tops and sides of the roadways, just to make sure there’s no additional voids under the pavement,” she said.

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached at cfeatherstone@columbiabasinherald.com.