Flaking from frigid freeze forces fancy fountains fix

FORT COLLINS – The Eye’s eye was caught recently by the sight of workers tearing up the new Oak Street Plaza fountain area in downtown Fort Collins.

Jack hammers were pounding away at the new fancy sidewalks, embellished with red crushed glass, which were just installed last August. It seems the sidewalks had fallen victim to a particularly cold and snowy winter and were beginning to flake away.

“It was just a hard winter,´ said Bill Whirty, maintenance supervisor for the city’s parks department. “The regular concrete’s held up fine. It’s the fancy stuff with the crushed glass.”

The city, along with the Downtown Development Authority, teamed up last year to spend almost $1 million on a revamping of Oak Street Plaza, one of the downtown’s prime gathering areas. The project included the red-glass-embedded sidewalks, new paver stones and several fountains, including some “shooter” fountains that send streams of water into receiving sculptures.

The shooters are a delight for passersby, especially kids who can’t resist putting themselves in the line of fire, er, water.

But the shooters and other fountains were shut down for about 10 days while city workers and employees of Colorado Hardscapes of Denver, the contractor hired to do the installation, labored to replace portions of the flaked-out sidewalks.

Craig Kissling, planner with the city’s parks department, said last winter’s unusually brutal conditions caused the flaking and that it was not related to the original installation.

“Basically it was due to extreme winter conditions,” he said. “We had some failure due to the repeated freeze-thaw and some ice melt stuff that was used.”

Kissling told the Eye that the ice melt mixture turned out to be a little too strong for the fancier concrete. “We weren’t sure it would do that. It was just one of those unfortunate things. We won’t use the same ice melt in the future. We’ll probably just use sand.”

Kissling said tests confirmed the flaking had nothing to do with the contractor’s workmanship and that means the city is footing the $22,000 bill to get it fixed.

Kissling said the repair project was expected to be completed by May 23.

The sculpture in the plaza is called “Confluence,” by Denver artist Lawrence Argent who was commissioned to design it through the city’s “Art in Public Places” program.

The shooter fountains are “pretty touchy,” Kissling says, and can get thrown off fairly easily. “Any little bit of wind can push (the streams) off,” he said. “They’re pretty vulnerable. If kids put a rock down (a fountain jet) it can affect it.”

Even so, Kissling said the city made the changes to the plaza knowing that additional care would be needed to keep everything running smoothly. “We knew there would be maintenance issues,” he said. “It was anticipated.”

And if the only measurement of success is the laughter of children playing in the shooting fountains on a hot day, it probably was worth it.

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