End Is Near For Leach Park MWRA Work

The year-long work at Reading's Leach Park hasn't forced any of the residents on Walnut Street to have a get-me-out-of-here moment. But if they did put their homes up for sale, no one could blame them for adding an extra half-bath to the description. When the portable NSC restroom is right outside your front door, it just seems to make sense.

The project, a few steps down Summer Ave from Joshua Eaton, seems to have lasted forever. But just last week the construction vehicles, the workers, and most important, the portable toilet, all disappeared. The end is certainly near, with just the fencing remaining.

But the question remains, what were they doing?

As explained by Jeff Zager, Reading's Director of the Department of Public Works, it's an MWRA project that started in 2016 to install a large underground vault in the park. The vault would allow a second, and redundant, connection to the MWRA water system at the Stoneham end, with the current connection located off of Border Road.

I know what you're thinking. What's a vault?

As explained by Zager, "the vault is actually an underground chamber (room), where the pipe coming in from Stoneham actually connects to the Reading water system. It contains a series of valves, pressure pumps, etc., that would probably only be needed in an emergency situation. Again this would be the MWRA emergency second connection for the Town of Reading, and would be used only if the current main service connection on Border road failed."

Zager said he hoped that the work would be completed by the late fall and he was almost right. But unexpected delays have pushed the completion until the spring and that work includes new landscaping, including new trees, and said Zager in an email, "brought back to its original state/condition or better."

If you didn't know, Leach park is named in memory of Ernest H. Leach, a graduate of the Reading schools. Leach was killed during World War I in an airplane accident at Isodum, France on Jan. 21, 1918. Before he died, he wrote, "Any vain curiosity that I may have had regarding war is quite dispelled; war at its best is very bad. But I am glad the United States is going to do her part to end it, and in the right way . . . Whichever way things turn out, I won't lose. There are worse things than losing your life in the best cause a nation ever had."

Leach sounds like a good guy. And in the spring the park that bears his name should be something he'd be proud of.

Photos by Bob Holmes