Pile driving on the St. Croix River, silenced because of cold weather, soon will resume in a cadence of pounding that will continue into May.
Crews will drive 875 beams into the ground on the Minnesota side of the river to support piers and abutments for a new St. Croix River bridge. Ten piers in the river were completed in December.
"Think how much worse it would be with the windows open," said Mary McComber, mayor of Oak Park Heights, who lives in a neighborhood a few hundred yards from where the clanging will take place.
Still, she said, pile driving has not generated the level of community reaction heard months ago when ground vibrations from earthmoving equipment shook houses.
"There were a lot of vibrations all at the same time," McComber said.
At a recent City Council meeting, she said vibrations were bad enough that one day she received five phone calls from residents before 9 a.m. "It would be nice to have a little forewarning that it was coming," she said.
Contractors suspended pile driving and related construction activity during the recent spell of arctic weather. The construction site, within a few hundred yards of Oak Park Heights neighborhoods on either side of Hwy. 36, will see continuing work through the winter, said project manager Jon Chiglo of the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT).
"We require the contractor to drive pilings through the winter to try to mitigate some of the impacts for noise that people might encounter if it was done during the summer," he told the Washington County Board recently. "You'll hear pile driving, you'll see foundations being poured, you'll see piers being constructed on the Minnesota approach."
