Bad news for drivers who frequent Ulmerton Road.
They're tearing it up, again!
The main artery that crosses horizontally across Pinellas County has for years been a headache for commuters as the heavily-trafficked road was widened.
The City of Largo recently found out that some of the recently laid sewer pipes were poorly installed.
So, at one key intersection, Tall Pines Drive at Ulmerton Road, a contractor is being brought in to fix the installation.
And that means, once again, tearing up part of Ulmerton, a road now synonymous with construction.
"No one sets out to build something with defects. But when we find them we've got to fix it," says Largo's Engineering Services Director Jerald Woloszynski.
Woloszynski says the defects were discovered when they went to connect their new sewer stations to the pipes recently installed under Ulmerton.
The defect is what they call a "belly" or a dip in the line, and fixing it now, says Woloszynski, would cost less in the long run than needing to spend more resources maintaining the line by needing to clean out the debris from the dip more often.
A previous contractor, Conalvias USA, who may have laid the pipe down incorrectly in the first place, has agreed in a $123,169 settlement to pay for the work to fix it.
Woloszynski says it will take about a week to make the fixes, which should happen sometime within the next few weeks.
They hope to only need to block off one westbound lane of Ulmerton Road at Tall Pines Drive, but occasionally more lanes may be needed.
Other work around improperly-installed manholes are also going to be done around the same time nearby.
