Cal Contractor
Two months into a two-year project, workers at Sukut Construction Inc., California’s largest earthmover, noticed an incongruity between the plans and the execution of a $42.8 million contract to build a pump station and reservoirs for the Lancaster, California Water Reclamation Plant. The plan called for Sukut to grade four 82-acre reservoirs – with a total volume large enough to store more than a billion gallons of water – and to do so in such a way that the overall job remains a balanced site. This means the dirt would be neither exported nor imported from the site but rather reused in constructing the reservoirs. Earth excavated in one area, for example, would be reused as berms for the reservoirs. Sukut is scheduled to have the project completed by July 2010.
Shortly after groundbreaking in April 2008, Sukut’s earthmovers dug up a major surprise. Beneath the surface, the project site turned out to include an old sandy riverbed that silted up perhaps 10,000 to 20,000 years ago. When excavated and reused, the shrinkage factor - or loss in volume due to compaction – for this sand- silt mixture was an unusually large 35 percent rather than the 10 percent projected in the specifications. Over the entire project, Sukut realized, the dirt deficit was going to be substantial.
“We realized we had to make some big changes to make this work,” recalls Sukut project manager Jason Goldsbrough.
The project owner, Los Angeles County Sanitation District, authorized Sukut to redesign the reservoir floor grades to make the site balance.
Fortunately, Sukut was well prepared for the task in two significant ways. First, Sukut’s proprietary soils technology enabled the company to quickly and precisely recalculate the earthwork logistics using the new 35 percent shrinkage factor. Secondly, as a result of strategic decisions in recent years to invest in technology, Sukut’s heavy machinery at the jobsite was already fully equipped with computerized global positioning systems ( GPS). The onboard GPS allowed equipment operators to download revised 3-dimentional models of the jobsite and set the computer parameters to automatically guide the equipment blade to make the right cuts and fills. As Sukut had anticipated in making the technology investment, GPS provided the flexibility to redesign and execute the changes on the go, saving time and money while increasing precision.
“That was a pretty big task. With the GPS we have on the equipment, we had to create a model or a design based on data we received from our transmitters to make sure the job was going to balance out,” Goldsbrough said. “Because the shrinkage factor was so huge, we had to excavate the floors deeper than what the design called for. We had to identify what grade are we going to go to, then decide if that gives us enough dirt to finish the berms. It was constant back and forth between the GPS, Don Barnes, our field supervisor, and myself telling machinery operators where they had to cut to.”
In some cases, Sukut found it needed to excavate about a foot deeper than the plans showed. The revised excavation profile amounted to 300,000 to 400,000 additional yards of earth moved.
By mid-August, approximately midway through the contract period, Goldsbrough said the problem was resolved, and the overall contract was 70-75 percent complete.
“Dealing with unforeseen circumstances are just part of the job for contractors moving major quantities of earth and building underground infrastructure,” said Environmental Division President, Dave Grattan. “And as California’s largest mass excavation and grading contractor that has moved over a billion cubic yards of earth, we are fully experienced in meeting these types of challenges.”
Sukut built its reputation as a dominant player in the private homebuilding industry providing turnkey site development including road and underground infrastructure for many of the state’s modern subdivisions. But as the national economy changed, the firm found itself well-positioned as one of a handful of companies nationwide capable of tackling some of the multi-billion-dollar work of repairing the country’s aging infrastructure. Sukut’s aggressive expansion of the company’s public works division to exploit its recognized expertise in large-scale geotechnical infrastructure construction includes projects such as this.
The Lancaster project is one of the largest currently under contract by Sukut and represents an expansion of the company’s reach, in that Sukut is performing all of the mechanical and structural work in the pump station. In all, Sukut expects to move almost 2 million cubic yards of earth to complete this project.
Sukut’s contract is part of a multi-stage upgrade of the level of treatment of the Lancaster Water Reclamation Plant, and the addition of four new storage reservoirs, a storage tank, a pump station and pipelines to deliver non-potable water to and from storage sites and to reuse sites. The treatment plant is switching from oxidation ponds to conventional activated sludge treatment with tertiary filtration and disinfection.
Sukut’s part of the overall project involves construction of the infrastructure that will take treated wastewater from the plant and send it in one of several directions, depending on the need. The reclaimed water will travel through a 14-mile pipeline to a 2-million-gallon steel storage tank, or to one of four new reservoirs. The reservoirs combined encompass almost 400 acres and can hold more than a billion gallons of water. Some of the reclaimed water is expected to be used to irrigate a 5,000-acre agricultural parcel northeast of the plant by way of an 18-mile pipeline. The expectation is that water will be stored during the wet winter months to be used in the summer when water demands peak. The four new reservoirs join older ones built of earth or lined in concrete. The new reservoirs are being lined on the slopes with an 80-mm high-density polyurethane (HDPE) plastic liner and on the floors with 60-mm HDPE liner – totaling 15 million square feet.
Sukut’s contract includes numerous other critical elements: The job calls for construction of inlet and outlet concrete structures at each reservoir, two underground metering devices and two underground mechanical screening rooms where debris that falls into the open air reservoirs will be sifted out to prevent pipe blockages.
The contract also calls for an underground concrete pump station that will house eight water pumps: four 250 horsepower pumps to propel water into the reservoirs, and four 700 hp pumps to move water 14 miles to the storage tank.
Although most of the structures are underground, there will be an above ground 30,000-gallon surge tank and an electrical building accessible to workers to house the control panels for the entire site.
Founded almost 40 years ago and headquartered in Santa Ana, California, with offices in Los Angeles, Oceanside, and Riverside, California. The company is nationally recognized for its construction of residential, commercial, industrial and retail development mass grading; flood and storm water piping and structures; highway and infrastructure; golf courses, resorts, and landfill construction; environmental cleanups; and emergency landslide repair and stabilization.
Sukut is ranked within the top 100 environmental contractors in the nation. It is also among the nation’s top 20 storm and floodwater systems contractors, and is California’s #1 landfill contractor.
Other of Sukut’s recent large projects includes a seismic retrofit of the San Pablo Dam for the East Bay Municipal Water District. The company also is charged with site development for a section of the U.S.-Mexico border fence and is widening a 1.3-mile segment of State Route 76 in Fallbrook, California.
For more information call 888 785-8801 or www.sukut.com.
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