Beretania Street should soon offer drivers a smoother ride now that road crews are finally repaving the major thoroughfare, resuming work more than a year after abruptly stopping when they encountered shallow utility lines.
City officials and their contracted crews say it should now take about a month to repave Beretania from University Avenue to Alapai Street, and an additional two months to wrap follow-up activities linked to the repair project.
“I’ve been pushing, ‘When are we going to start? When are we going to start?’”
Mayor Kirk Caldwell
Speaking about the Beretania Street repair project that was halted in 2014
Crews with the private firm Road and Highway Builders started closing some lanes on Wednesday and tearing up parts of the road — one of Honolulu’s oldest and busiest streets — between University and Isenberg Street as they prepared to resurface it.
Mayor Kirk Caldwell called the noise of their heavy equipment “music to my ears” during a news conference to tout the work. “I’ve been pushing, ‘When are we going to start? When are we going to start?’”
Crews had started the Beretania repairs in the fall of 2014 but stopped after the discovery of utility lines blocked plans to repave the road as deep as 18 inches below the surface.
The repaving effort that got underway Wednesday is a shallower, “mill-and-fill” job that goes as deep as 4 inches, according to city Design and Construction Department Director Robert Kroning. Crews will work 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., and the shallower job is expected to last at least five years, officials said.
By the time this repaving wears out, the utilities should be ready to relocate their lines deeper below the surface, city officials say. Then crews can complete a deeper repaving of Beretania, which should last for about 15 years, Kroning said.
Road and Highway Builders’ city contract for the Beretania work was renegotiated from $9.4 million for the full-depth repave to $8.4 million for the mill-and-fill, city officials said. Despite the large difference in the two jobs, the city was unable to save more because it needed to compensate the contractor for mobilizing and then having to stop, Kroning said. Most of the $1 million in savings was for materials, he added.
Under Caldwell, the city is currently spending more than $100 million annually as part of a repaving surge to make up for decades of road care neglect on an island where city officials say some roads haven’t been paved for more than 50 years.
Despite the progress, motorists have been left waiting for the city to repave major arteries such as Beretania. In the coming months, work will begin on Date Street, parts of Ward Avenue and St. Louis Heights, city officials said. Repaving work just wrapped on Kapahulu Avenue, Kroning added.
