Massachusetts Port Authority officials confirmed on Tuesday that the northern section of the Hanscom Field runway known as 5-23 will be resurfaced over a five-week period beginning sometime in August.
The gate to the work site will be off Hartwell Road, and as many as 1,000 dump truck trips will traverse Hartwell from the Concord Road side, Massport project manager Steve Fletcher told the Hanscom Field Advisory Commission. He added that the truck traffic is expected only for the first 10 days.
The process involves milling the existing pavement, crack repair on the milled surface, and resurfacing with hot-mix asphalt. Besides the 2,057 feet of runway, the project includes resurfacing of two nearby taxiways.
Plans call for weekday work starting at 6 or 7 a.m. and continuing until 4 or 5 p.m., said Alex Normandin, engineer of record. Select Board member Emily Mitchell, who represents the town on HFAC, noted the town has a 7 a.m. noise ordinance threshold.
The average daily dump truck traffic, Fletcher said, will be 25 vehicles making four trips in and out of the airport. Mitchell asked if he meant 100 trips, and he confirmed. Amber Goodspeed, airport operations manager, said the estimate of 2,000 truck trips for last year’s project turned out to be 10 percent too high.
Normandin said the route was accepted by Bedford safety and public works officials at a meeting in April. Trucks carry hot asphalt to the site and milled asphalt away.
Goodspeed told the commission that the runway will be closed for five weeks, but did not indicate the resulting impact on flight patterns.
The area is north of the intersection of the short and long runways. The southern portion was resurfaced last summer with the construction staging on the Lincoln side. Normandin said that, mirroring the practice last year, excess pavement on each side will be replaced with grass, totaling more than three acres.
There’s one other piece of the project: relocation of fencing at the northeast end of the runway to confirm to federal standards.
The benign, 10-minute presentation was in sharp contrast to the local reaction to resurfacing of the 7,011-foot runway called 11-29 back in August 2017. That involved 30 days of continuous activity with construction staging not only off Hartwell, but also at the end of South Road in a residential neighborhood with narrow streets.
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What measures will Massport be making to mitigate excessive noise from scarification of existing surface and from silica dust raised from the removal process? Five weeks of heavy construction is definitely going to have a negative impact on quality of life and health of nearby residents and of children using the soccer fields at Edge. Also what exactly is the relocation of fencing? This seems to be vague “one other piece of the project” thrown in without specifics? Massport should be replacing all surrounding chain link fencing with sound suppression barriers to mitigate aircraft on runway noise.during maintenance, takeoff revving of engines and reverse thrust noise on landings.