By WAYNE THOMPSON
Up to 19 areas in Auckland City will have roads dug up again by telecommunications companies, which have been told to fix deficient cable-laying works.
The Auckland City Council said yesterday remedial work was expected to take until the end of next month - on top of normal scheduled trenching and cable-laying work which started last summer and could last until the end of the year.
The remedial work is to deal with subsidences in trenches caused by poor compacting of fill material, trenches resealed with different material than that used elsewhere on the road, and cables laid above the specified minimum depth.
The council had secured agreement from the companies to do the remedial work, said the chairwoman of the council's transport and roading committees, Catherine Harland.
"The network operators are extremely keen to make sure the work has been done correctly and we have gone through and agreed on where work should be done to substandard works.
"It would have been better if they had done it right the first time but it's good they have agreed to go back and fix it up."
Catherine Harland said the council refused to name which companies were responsible for the deficiencies.
"Some companies have done a really good job and others have had particular difficulties and we are about making sure the work is corrected and the ratepayers don't bear the cost now or in the future."
The companies involved in the summer cabling were UnitedNetworks, TelstraSaturn, CityLink and Tangent.
The project manager for UnitedNetworks, David Stone, said yesterday he was not prepared to say how many of the 19 sites on the remedial list were to be attended to by the company.
"They weren't all us," he said. "Some of those are other people's but I'm not going to comment on who the others might be. It's not appropriate."
The company had finished its scheduled construction work in the central business district, he said. Remedial work would have been finished earlier but the council wanted it done more slowly to minimise disruption.
Mr Stone said any deficient work should be put into the perspective of the huge number of sites being developed in a short period. Since last November, the company had installed 30km of cable network and at one stage had 90 sites under construction by 19 contractors' crews.
While any deficiencies were regretted, the company had sought to minimise the disruption. Less than 10 per cent of the work used existing gas pipes, to reduce the number of open trenches.
The 1400 retailers in the central business area were disappointed that the streets faced further disruption after a long summer of works, said the general manager of Heart of the City, Alex Swney.
But businesses accepted that this was short-term pain which would bring benefits, such as a technology hub with the best range of data services in the country and at prices ruled by competition.
Dig this! 19 fix-it jobs and still there's more
AdvertisementAdvertise with NZME.