Government

Dougherty, Card sit down tomorrow with LIPA on pipeline

REPORTER FILE PHOTO | A meeting on the stalled power pipeline project will convene tomorrow at Town Hall.

A meeting has been scheduled for tomorrow morning at Town Hall with Supervisor Jim Dougherty, Commissioner of Public Works Jay Card Jr. and representatives of the Long Island Power Authority.

Item number one on the agenda is how to proceed with the unfinished power pipeline from the Island to the North Fork after the firing of the project’s contractor, Bortech, on Wednesday.

In a memo Thursday afternoon to Mr. Card, members of the Town Board, Town Attorney Laury Dowd and Police Chief Jim Read, the supervisor said he had been in touch with LIPA Field Superintendent Bill Softye and LIPA District Manager Todd Stebbins.

In the memo, Mr. Dougherty wrote that National Grid “had advised Bortech to ‘suspend activities and demobilize by October 25.’”

Mr. Dougherty wrote, “In answer to my queries, LIPA’s reps said the demobilization will included a ‘full restoration schedule.’”

The current plan, Mr. Dougherty was told, is to go out to bid the project for a new contractor and hope for a January 1, 2014 start date.

Mr. Dougherty was also told an option would be to take another route under the bay “as opposed to paralleling the current route.”

The planned 4,000-foot-long tunnel from Crescent Beach to Greenport, running 40 feet below the bottom of the bay, was 500 feet from the North Fork when a drill bit malfunctioned and shut down all work in late August.

“Meetings are continuous, the situation shifts by the hour, and I was promised we would learn substantially more at our meeting at 11 a.m. tomorrow morning,” Mr. Dougherty wrote to the other town officials.

The $9 million project, launched in the spring and initially scheduled to be completed by Memorial Day, is aimed at providing backup power to Shelter Island.

The Island currently depends primarily on one aging line from Southold since a second line was damaged during Hurricane Sandy.

When completed, the project will provide three cables linking Shelter Island to the Southold substation. Another line runs between Shelter Island and North Haven to the south, but provides only limited power to the Island.