They did it. Contractors for the City of Eureka successfully drilled a hole beneath Pine Hill and ran a 36-inch wastewater pipe through it, thus succeeding where a previous contractor had failed.

You may recall that, back in March, Oregon-based Apex Directional Drilling walked off the Martin Slough Interceptor project, a multi-million-dollar wastewater system upgrade co-financed by the City of Eureka and the Humboldt Community Services District. Apex accused the consulting engineers on the project of misidentifying the soil under the hill. (They were expecting stable dirt and instead found flowing sand, which caused the hole to keep collapsing, company representatives said.) In May Apex filed a $6.3 million lawsuit against the City alleging “negligence, misrepresentations and breach of contract.” 

That suit is still pending, but the new contractors have proved that the job was indeed possible. Eureka-based Wahlund Construction, originally a subcontractor for Apex, took over as the general contractor in April while HDD Co. Inc., a directional drilling company out of Cameron Park, took over the drilling and pipe work.

How were Wahlund and HDD able to succeed where Apex could not? Wahlund Construction President Ken Wahlund was reluctant to talk about it in those terms, given the pending lawsuit against the City, but he did explain some of the techniques used to complete the job. The first order of business was freeing up the drill steel that Apex left buried in a hole roughly 3,000 feet long. 

Wahlund explained that HDD used a large “donut ring” attachment and shot high-viscosity mud into the hole as a lubricant. This particular hole went underground near the municipal golf course. In order to free the drill steel HDD dug in from the other side, near Highway 101, using a smaller rig, Wahlund said.

Then the company finished drilling the hole, using first an 18-inch reamer and then a 36-inch attachment to pull material out. After the hole was bored to a large enough diameter, Wahlund Construction pulled three large lengths of pipe through, each section measuring about 1,500 feet. Company employees are now testing the pipeline.

This breakthrough is being viewed as a vindication by SHN Consulting Engineers and Geologists, the Eureka company whose soil analysis was besmirched by Apex. SHN geologist Roland Johnson was careful not to say anything negative about Apex, though he did give credit to HDD Co. Inc.

“I think it’s safe to say that there’s substantial difference between the experience of the two contractors,” Johnson said. HDD, he added, “clearly were able to accomplish something the others either didn’t want to try or couldn’t do.”

The big question that remains is how much these hiccups have added to the cost of the project. It had been slated to cost more than $7 million. Wahlund was awarded a contract for nearly $4 million to complete it after Apex abandoned work. And of course, the lawsuit is still pending.

Bruce Young, Eureka’s director of Public Works, said the total cost — or even a rough estimate — will be difficult to calculate. Much of the preparatory work done on the original contract — work areas and access roads, for example — carried over to the latter phase, Young said.

As for the dispute over the soil makeup, Young defended SHN’s analysis. The consulting engineers identified the soil as Hookton Formation, described as a mix of gravel, sand, silt and clay. “Hookton is — it’s more of a place in geologic time than anything else,” Young said. Sometimes it can be solid; other times it’s less so. “But I think the base report [by SHN] fairly accurately described what [Apex] might expect,” Young said.

Young, too, was cognizant of Apex’s pending lawsuit. “I’m being careful,” he said, “but HDD has proven that, using the right techniques ,you could indeed accomplish what was being asked to be accomplished.”

He said he and the City’s consulting engineer will get back to the Outpost soon with an updated estimate of the project’s total cost.

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UPDATE: Apex Drilling President Releases Statement Regarding Martin Slough Project Breakthrough