By Andy Sevilla.
For months, Kyle city officials have notified the county and the engineers of Dacy Lane that the newly constructed roadway was in need of repairs, particularly between Bebee and Goforth Roads.
In a Nov. 6 email, Kyle City Manager Lanny Lambert notified Hays County Precinct 2 Commissioner Mark Jones that repairs to Dacy Lane surface cracks were needed, and that the city was reaching out to the county because the group involved with its construction had not remedied the problem.
“This was a Hays County project in which LAN was the contracted engineering firm and construction was contracted to Capital Excavation,” the email said. “Shortly after the completion of the Dacy Lane project, City of Kyle Public Works staff began noticing numerous cracks appearing in the surface of the roadway.”
The damage was made known to the contact engineer, Graham Moore, for the project.
“We have several past e-mail correspondences between city staff and Graham Moore, which further show our efforts in an attempt to have Dacy Lane repaired.”
Kyle Public Works Director Harper Wilder told the Hays Free Press that the roadway was still under warranty and that LAN would cover needed repairs.
In a Nov. 5 email to Wilder, Eddy Etheredge, LAN business development representative, said a senior roadway engineer for the firm inspected the road and learned that the grades along the roadway and the private drive “are as they should be,” there was no erosion of undisturbed soils (during construction), and the contractor applied several inches of top soil and seeded the area with “appropriate cover,” and evidence existed that it had in-fact sprouted and grown a little.
However, Etheredge also said in that email that the topsoil had been left “unstable” and “unprotected” due to months of drought and “apparently little or no watering.” He said that with two significant rain events within a couple of weeks from each other in October, the top soil simply washed off into the street.
“As a matter of fact,” he wrote, “similar situations occurred all over the county, even where there was no recent construction.”
Etheredge said inspection of the upper end of Dacy Lane, where the cracking occurred, revealed no apparent base failure, only pavement fissures.
“Those do need to be sealed with a tar-based sealant,” Etheredge told Wilder in the Nov. 5 email attained by the Hays Free Press through an open records request. “I visited with Commissioner Jones and he said he’d ask the county road crew to do that for you… With winter coming on, it is very important to seal those cracks in order that water not get in and freeze.”
But repairs to Dacy Lane have yet to be made.
Though the road remains under warranty, Graham, the original contact engineer for the project, is no longer with LAN, which has only slowed repairs.
Ethredge said in a Nov. 8 email to the LAN senior engineer, who inspected the roadway, that Graham was working with the contractor to address the cracking issues, however some contract language was seemingly holding up repairs.
“I think we need to get our hand around this ASAP,” he wrote.
Etheredge said their engineering contract was with Hays County, as it was a county project. He said the contractor’s contract also was with the county. Kyle is to take over complete maintenance of the roadway upon warranty expiration, Etheredge said in the Nov. 8 email.
