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With little fanfare, the City of Manchester has reached a $2.4 million settlement with Westfield Insurance over failure regarding the city’s sewer rehab project dating to 2020.

The Board of Mayor and Aldermen agreed to accept the settlement with Westfield Insurance concerning the now-defunct J&H Contractors, who were working on a bypass pumping operation and subsequent pump failure resulting in 1.8 million gallons of sewage being dumped in the Little Duck River over the course of a weekend when they walked off the job in 2020.

“It has been a long, hard haul….but we sign this and it’s over,” Mayor Marilyn Howard said.

City Attorney Craig Johnson said the contract for the job was just above $2.6 million. The surety bond for that was similarly set, but the bonding company declined to pay the city after J&H walked off the project.

A countersuit by the bonding company named the city engineer as a codefendant. Mediation in the case was held May 23, 2023. The bonding company will pay the city $2.45 million, while the city engineer will pay $100,000. The city and Westfield will also retain their claims against J&H Contractors, which is in bankruptcy following the incident.

Johnson said that arguably the city’s expenses were beyond what the surety bond was issued due to the costs incurred during discovery and while studies were performed.

For just about three years, the city maintained the operation of rented diesel bypass pumps that cost the city about $40,000 a month or about $700,000 as of November of 2021 and ran up over an estimated $1 million in expenses overall.

The situation started when just before that, J&H attempted a retrofit of a sewer line that crosses under the riverbed near Gateway Tire using the pipe bursting method resulting in a blowout of the sewer line from its encasement. What was not known at the time was that the contractor failed to hit inside the pipe and was in reality bursting the encasement atop the sewer pipe.

Water and Sewer Commission Chairman Michael Anderson said at the time that he was surprised Westfield Insurance Company groups, the bonding company, would take the chance of litigation.

Bypass pumps were in place along the Duck River Greenway since May 2020, when sewer plant operators came in May 18, 2020 to find flow into the plant less than usual. Workers checked the pumps and found that they had run dry of fuel and a section of sewer had dumped into the river all weekend long.

Bryan Pennington, who was Water Department director during the incident, said J&H should have indicated that it could not perform the bursting at the river crossing the same way the company did for a section on Skinner Flat Road that J&H deemed too close to the bridge for them to perform the work.

The sewer bids for Sewer Rehab on Basins E, F, H, I, and M are dated July 27, 2018, according to city documents. Six bids were opened J&H was chosen for the contract because it was lowest bidder at $2,909, 487.07, the next lowest bidder was Norris Bros. at $2,917,250.88 a difference of $7,763.81.

Norris Bros. recently finished the rehab on the remainder of that project