In February Laurium DPW garage caught fire. Destroying the village’s fleet of vehicles used throughout the year to maintain public infrastructure, and move snow. The fire came at a bad time too, with a winter storm on the way, neighbors of nearby communities pitched in to rid Laurium’s streets of snow.
However, it also gave the village council, the administration, and the public works department an opportunity to kind of look at what equipment we need, what don’t we need, what’s going to create the most efficiency for our community, and also possibly help out the residents of our community more than in the past. So one of those things was we used to have two graders. The village has kind of gone away from that way of thinking.
Since the fire, the village council has worked to find replacements and inventory what a new garage will need. Last week the state announced Laurium will receive 165,000 dollars as a part of the Financially distressed communities program. An award the village was very much in need of.
This grant will allow us to essentially purchase one newer model grader and buy newer, newer used. So we’re going to be looking at anywhere between a 2017 to a 2021 grader that we hope will last approximately 25 to 30 years for the Village of Laurium.
The public works department has its vehicles and operations set up around town right now. The village was granted access to the former North Houghton County Sewer Authority site and a garage owned by Calumet Township.
Our temporary garage isn’t high enough for many of the pieces of equipment such as a grater or our loaders. So we’re kind of operating out of various locations to fix our equipment when it breaks down. The community, our village has been blessed by Calumet Township, B &B Contracting, Kelsich Contracting, the Village of Lorian Fire Department, and other entities. that have graciously donated facilities for us to work on and fix equipment. And we’re likely going to have to keep working that way through next winter. So when a breakdown occurs, it may take us a little bit longer than usual. Also, we’re still accumulating a lot of our content and tools. We’re not fully up and running right now. But hopefully, by next spring we should be back to full operations when we hope that our new building will be put up.
Village Manager Ian Lewis says the council has begun work toward a new garage. Adding the goal will have public works move into a permanent site sometime in 2026.
I’ve been working very closely with the DPW Recovery Committee and we’ve been determining where is the next site going to be for the new home of the Loram DPW garage. So far the committee has narrowed it down to two locations. Neither of them is where the old location was. However, they haven’t made their decision at this time. It does sound like the old garage location is going to turn into a parking lot for the lore and baseball fields though. So it’ll kind of make it seem as though those baseball fields were always meant to be there so that people can easily access the baseball fields.
