Silicon Valley Clean Water (SVCW) is collaborating with Don Edwards National Wildlife Refuge regarding the plans for maintaining access to Inner Bair Island during construction, and facilitating ongoing restoration efforts following construction completion. Work will commence in late June on Inner Bair Island in Redwood City, including construction of a temporary one-mile long access road from the Whipple Avenue interchange to the north end of the island. The road is necessary to provide access to a tunnel boring machine (TBM) retrieval shaft that will be built during the summer and fall of 2019.
Construction teams will use a TBM to construct a tunnel as part of the SVCW RESCU infrastructure program. One of the tunnel segments terminates on Bair Island, where the TBM will be brought out from a receiving shaft. Construction crews will dismantled the TBM in pieces and transported off Bair Island. This gravity pipeline work on Bair Island requires construction of a temporary access road to move equipment safely, crew and materials from Whipple Avenue to the connection site.
The work will not affect the 1.7-mile Bair Island Trail. Access will be limited on the short section of the bicycle and pedestrian path from Whipple Avenue to the main trail. This work will not impact the official entry to the Trail is from Bair Island Road, which has a parking lot. In the tight area where the public connector trail and newly constructed access road are directly adjacent to each other, construction teams will construct a safety barrier to separate the public on the connector trail from construction traffic on the access road.
At the Whipple Avenue entrance to Bair Island, the public connector trail will temporarily narrow due to space constraints and kept to a minimum five-foot width. During periods of heavy construction traffic, the Bay Trail crossing at Whipple Avenue will be managed with flaggers to maintain public safety.
Bair Island construction is scheduled from August 2019 through January 2020. It is estimated that the TBM will be removed from Bair Island in early 2020. Other construction milestones include the construction of a drop structure to move sewage from the existing pipe to the new pipeline in 2021 and backfilling of the Bair Island shaft site in spring of 2022. After this work is complete, the temporary access road will be removed, and the entire area will be restored in partnership with the Don Edwards National Wildlife Refuge.
Download the Construction Notice.