Chesterton Town Council Member Jim Ton, R-1st, a resident of the South Point subdivision on Beverly Drive, is hoping that the next time there’s a planned outage of utility service--made necessary by the South Calumet District project--residents get a head’s up.

As Ton told the Redevelopment Commission at its meeting Monday night, NIPSCO apparently notified The Waters of Duneland and Jim’s Lawn & Garden of a planned outage of electric service in the middle of a recent night.

But NIPSCO did not notify residents, Ton said. They got the message anyway, though, when their sump pump alarms started clanging.

“If there is a planned outage, we could use some notice,” Ton added. “We already lost cable and Internet. Businesses in the area rely on the Internet.”

Town Engineer Mark O’Dell expressed his sympathy for the residents of South Point but said that the town, for its part, was in the same boat. “Those two businesses knew about the NIPSCO outage but the town and residents weren’t notified.”

There is one planned outage, on the other hand, which O’Dell hopes to have plenty of specific notice for: an interruption of telephone and Internet tentatively scheduled for the early morning hours of July 9-10, when Comcast will be re-locating the fiber optic cables which run from the Illinois/Indiana state line to Mishawaka.

That work is supposed to be done between 12 and 6 a.m. One cable will be re-located on the first day and the other on the second day. O’Dell said that he expects Comcast at some point to give him detailed information on the planned outage for the Chesterton Tribune.

Meanwhile, O’Dell said, Phase II of the South Calumet District project is underway, though moving forward in fits and starts.

Rain has been a problem, observed DLZ project manager Ron Steve, and general contractor G.E. Marshall was pumping water from the site on Saturday in preparation for work on Monday, and then it went and rained Monday morning.

A continuing problem, O’Dell added, has been the rupture of underground utility lines. Last week Verizon hit a NIPSCO natural-gas line and then hit the same service on Monday.

Earlier this year NIPSCO was directional-boring a gas line under 100E when--on two different occasions--it struck a Town of Chesterton sanitary sewer line.

“There are a lot of utilities out there,” O’Dell said, and all of them have been properly marked. “It wasn’t the town’s fault and it wasn’t G.E. Marshall’s fault” that Verizon hit the gas line.

For its part, O’Dell said, G.E. Marshall has removed the road surface from 100E and is clearing the right-of-way, as motorists accustomed to using 100E have discovered.

Steve, O’Dell emphasized, “is keeping close tabs on the project.”

Later in the meeting, Member Sharon Darnell said that Steve was also the project manager in the later phases of the wastewater treatment plant expansion and was instrumental in saving the Utility money and time as that project neared completion. “It’s nice to have him on this project, watching out for our interests.”

Members voted 4-0 to approve three claims: $106,958.30 from Walsh & Kelly, the general contractor for Phase I of the project; $876 from Cusip Global Services for work on the bond; and $687.50 from Harris Welsh & Lukmann.

Member Mark Singer was not in attendance.

Posted 6/23/2009