By ROBERT LINNEHAN
A decade-old project is finally ready to begin as a gravity sewer line running down Grove Street will hook into the Camden County sewer system. Work on the project will begin this week and will likely take eight to 10 weeks.
The project will cost the borough $680,000.
Mayor Tish Colombi — director of the public works department — said this project was first devised when Gene Kain was mayor and Richard Schwab was administrator in Haddonfield almost a decade ago. After several design changes and meetings with the county, Colombi said it’s finally ready to begin construction.
A sewer gravity line will be built under a portion of Grove Street near the border of Haddonfield and Cherry Hill. The gravity line will run under the bridge into the county system and serve the Radnor, Farwood and Beachwood neighborhoods in Haddonfield.
For years, these neighborhoods have been having sewer difficulties, Colombi said, and the borough understood what needed to be addressed. However, when it was first considered more than 10 years ago, nobody involved knew how complicated it would turn out to be.
The county originally wanted Haddonfield to construct a gravity line up to the Maple Avenue municipal utility authority site, Colombi said, which would have had the sewage flowing uphill. It would have been immensely more complicated, she said, and for years the county wouldn’t change its stance.
“When the county said they would let us hook up into their system the other way, downhill, it was much less complicated,” Colombi said.
Finally, in 2010 the county opted to allow Haddonfield to hook into its system near S. Washington Avenue in Cherry Hill.
The new sewer line will allow the borough to remove a pump station in the Farwood neighborhood that it has wanted to take offline for many years, Colombi said.
The Department of Environmental Protection also required the borough to change its design plans for the project several times, Colombi said.
“We finally got the county to get involved and allow us to put the gravity pipe under the bridge to hook into the county system. It’s taking the entire sewage from the Farwood area and across the street in Beechwood. It will all be going into the county system in that area,” she said.
It will affect traffic coming into Haddonfield from Cherry Hill on Grove Street during construction. S. Washington Avenue may be inaccessible during portions of the construction.
