County restarts Claribel Road project between McHenry and Oakdale Road

Stanislaus County’s project to widen Claribel Road has fired back up and could be completed in October, a public works official said.

The construction work stalled last fall when a shallow gas transmission line was discovered. Workers digging holes to look for underground utilities found one on the south edge of Claribel’s former eastbound lane, east of Coffee Road.

Chris Brady, deputy director of public works, said the transmission line was so shallow it would have been 6 inches below ground after the new road base was cut.

Rather than have cars and trucks running directly over the gas line, the county suspended work on the new lanes. It waited months for Pacific Gas and Electric Co. to replace about 1,500 feet of the transmission pipeline, part of it in front of a mobile home park on Claribel.

PG&E finished work on the new 8-foot-deep pipeline section in late July.

Brady expects the 2-mile Claribel project, which began in mid-2014, will be finished four or five months beyond the original completion date.

The county is spending $6.4 million on construction to widen a congested section of Claribel between McHenry Avenue and Oakdale Road. With the prerecession growth boom in north Modesto and Riverbank, vehicle counts on the two-lane road increased to 15,000 per day, resulting in more traffic accidents.

The new road will have four lanes with a small median and a signal at the Claribel-Coffee intersection, which will remove a serious bottleneck.

“There will be a bottleneck for the next month and a half,” Brady said. “A lot of that delay is going to go away.”

The county also will add turn lanes at Claribel and Oakdale roads near the Crossroads commercial center in Riverbank.

Brady said the delay caused by the natural gas line will add to the final cost for the road. Contractor George Reed Inc. had to do construction out of sequence, pull workers from the project and provide traffic control for an extra five months, Brady said.

“We don’t have it tabulated yet,” Brady said. “It is in the tens of thousands of dollars at this point.”

Because the gas line was shallow by today’s standards, the county has talked with PG&E about covering part of the cost, Brady said.

This story was originally published September 10, 2015 at 1:31 PM with the headline "County restarts Claribel Road project between McHenry and Oakdale Road."