By Victor Tine
PLUM ISLAND — The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will open bids next Monday on a long-awaited project of beach re-nourishment at Plum Island and Salisbury.
Contractors' interest in bidding for the project is difficult to gauge precisely, but 10 companies sent representatives to a pre-bid conference last month at the Army Corps New England District office in Concord, according to the agency's public affairs specialist Tim Dugan.
Seventeen companies have put their names on the "interested vendors list" for the project at the U.S. government Web site that publishes the specifications of available federal contracts. The bid process will be crucial to the project, because it will gauge whether companies believe the work can be done within the government's budget.
Army Corps Project Manager Jack Karalius has said he hopes to receive more bids than the three that came in during the first round of price quotes in November.
Only one of those three, from AIS Construction of Carpinteria, Calif., came in under the project budget and the bid had to be thrown out because the company did not have the proper equipment to do the work, forcing the project to be pushed back to this fall.
AIS is not among the interested vendors on the list for the current round of bids.
The government estimate for the project was $2.923 million in November, and Karalius has said it is unlikely to change much in the current round. Contractors are considered within budget if their bids are no more than 25 percent above the government estimate.
The interested vendors list in November had 16 companies on it, just one fewer than had signed up as of Friday for this round of bids.
Seven of the firms that took out specs for the first bid have also done so for next week's bidding. Only one of those, Great Lakes Dredge & Dock Co. of Oak Brook, Ill., submitted a bid in the first round — and it was a whopping $10.184 million, far more than the project maximum of $3.654 million.
Among several new entrants to the interested vendors list is Netco, The Lexington-based erosion control company that in late 2008 built the five-layer network of giant sandbags that has successfully protected a critical section of the dune through two winters.
The project calls for dredging the Merrimack River channel to a depth of 17 feet and depositing the dredged sand directly onto the beach at Plum Island and in Salisbury.
The operation is expected to yield a total of 160,000 cubic yards of sand, 120,000 of which will be pumped onto about 2,500 feet of Plum Island shoreline. The sand is expected to create 20 additional feet of dune along that stretch and an additional 50-foot width of beach.
The remaining 40,000 cubic yards will be deposited on Salisbury Beach.
The last time the channel was dredged, in 1999, the operation yielded 145,000 yards of sand, according to the Army Corps project Web site.
Sand from dredging operations is normally dumped near the shore, which is far cheaper than onshore deposit.
The additional project expense has been justified as cost-effective by an Army Corps report in January 2009 that indicated as many as 26 homes could be lost to erosion over the next 10 years if nothing were done.
The federal government is picking up the bulk of the tab for the project. The state Department of Conservation and Recreation is contributing and the towns of Newbury and Salisbury also share some of the expense.
If a qualified bidder emerges within budget, work is expected to begin around Sept. 1 and take about two months to complete.
