PROJECT: Raw Water Facilities

LOCATION: 10350 Arrowhead Creek Lane, Wilsonville

COST:��$10,028,300

START DATE: June 2020

ANTICIPATED END DATE: July 2021

OWNER/DEVELOPER: Willamette Water Supply Program

ENGINEER: Black & Veatch Corp. (Jeff McMullen)

GENERAL CONTRACTOR: Kiewit Infrastructure West Co.

TUNNELING SUBCONTRACTOR: James W. Fowler Co.

SIGNIFICANCE OF PROJECT: The Willamette Water Supply System Commission’s goal is to provide a stable and seismically resilient water supply for ratepayers in Washington County. The cities of Hillsboro and Beaverton, along with the Tualatin Valley Water District, have come together to build more than 30 miles of large-diameter pipelines, expand the existing raw water facility, and modify an intake on the Willamette River near Wilsonville, a new raw water filtration facility near Sherwood and water reservoirs on Cooper Mountain.

James W. Fowler Co., serving as the trenchless subcontractor for general contractor Kiewit, is constructing a 270-foot pipe ram of 84-inch-diameter steel pipe underneath Arrowhead Creek, the 55-foot-diameter by 54-foot-deep secant pile launch shaft and 25-foot-diameter by 45-foot-deep secant pile reception shaft, 500 feet of 66-inch welded steel pipe, approximately 1,000 feet of underground utilities, tie-in to the existing pipeline, cleaning and pressure-testing of the pipelines, and other miscellaneous items to complete the pipeline installation. The pipe ram was completed below the water table in cobble- and boulder-laden ground using specialized equipment.

Construction and then operations were expected to create more than 4,000 jobs.

“Building Blocks” spotlights noteworthy projects either under construction or approaching the start of construction. To submit a project for consideration, please visit: djcorprod.wpengine.com/building-blocks.

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For decades, observers have seen the city of Portland tackle projects to address aging, dilapidated infrastructure.  One of the most important ones now taking place will be much less conspicuous.

The Willamette River Crossing Project is an estimated $88 million effort to build a seismically resilient water pipeline underneath the Willamette River and connect two large header pipes – one on each side. Those header pipes provide connections for six water pipelines across the river and act like a manifold for the city’s water supply system.

“Water from Bull Run (Watershed) comes from the east side, and we have six ways for that water to get underneath the Willamette,” said Tim Collins, a project manager and supervising engineer with the Portland Water Bureau. “Where we’re standing today (Jan. 20), we can see four of them.”

The new pipeline will align roughly with Mill Street on the east side of the river. It will feature 39-inch-diameter steel pipe running roughly 150 feet beneath the riverbed. The engineers intend to use horizontal directional drilling to embed the pipe in the Troutdale Formation – an ancient layer of large rocks. When the pipeline is set around three years from now, it will run roughly one mile in length from downtown on the west side to somewhere in the vicinity of Southeast Seventh Avenue and Mill Street on the east side.

Getting there, however, has been a challenge for the project team. This past summer, exploratory work with a hydraulically powered percussion probing machine found that soils in the route originally planned for the pipeline could not support horizontal directional drilling. This led to delays so that engineers could develop a better map of soils.

“What we had before was a lot of information on the shore,” Collins said. “But we didn’t have good information on the river.”

Instead of the anticipated bedrock, drilling crews encountered saturated sediments completely unsuitable for the purpose, Collins said.

“You have a whole lot of loose gravel and crappy stuff, and you can drill through it, but the gravels collapse on the back side of the drill steel,” he said. “You can get through it, but you can’t get back. We started over there and that happened to us.”

Right now, a crew from Holt Services of Vancouver, Washington, is taking soil samples from a variety of depths beneath the river. This work will guide engineers as they reconfigure the work needed to bore through the earth and place the new pipeline. All of this work is taking place under the watch of contractor James W. Fowler Co. of Dallas.

“We stepped back and said, ‘OK, this isn’t going to work,’” Collins said. “We need to figure out how to get through that formation, and that’s why we’re here today. We’re going to do it differently than the first time around so that we can observe and understand what that old formation looks like so we can decide whether we go above it or below it.”

Crews are currently sampling up to 200 feet beneath the riverbed, down into the Troutdale Formation. Two different methods are being used. In the first, a pointed drilling head is driven into the sediments in order to measure depth and soil compaction. In the second, called sonic drilling, lengths of drill steel essentially vibrate into the sediments, where an open-ended bit collects samples into plastic bags.

“That’s useful because what that does is show you exactly what the formation is,” Collins said. “We’re doing the type that tells us how strong it is, and we’re doing the sampling that tells us what the material is.”

The pipeline is being placed in solid rock to help it withstand seismic events. The flexibility of steel pipe as well as its placement will do that. By contrast, the other five pipelines either sit in shallow trenches on the bottom of the river, or are attached to a bridge (the Ross Island Bridge, for instance). Neither of those placements is ideal from a seismic safety standpoint.

The new pipeline will help ensure that West Portland facilities, including critical health care ones, continue to receive water in an emergency from the new, seismically enhanced reservoir at Washington Park.

“The two projects are not that useful without each other,” said Katy Asher, a senior communications specialist with the Water Bureau. “You have storage and transmission. But if you can’t get it there, who cares if you’re storing it there or vice versa. It doesn’t matter if you have a good receptacle if you can’t get it there.”

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At the corner of Southwest 18th Avenue and Salmon Street, in the Goose Hollow neighborhood, a 27-year-old international real estate company is entering the Portland market.

General contractor Hoffman Construction is leading the effort to deliver an eight-story building with 182 apartments over 8,000 square feet of ground-floor retail space and a single level of below-grade parking. SERA Architects‘ design for Charleston, S.C.-based Greystar was approved by the Portland Design Commission in September 2018.

“18th and Salmon is ideally suited as Greystar’s first Portland project,” said Doug Burges, a director of development with the firm. “It leverages our core competency with extremely complex sites and experience in high-barrier-to-entry markets such as those in which we are very active along the West Coast.”

The site at 1715 S.W. Salmon St. is a wedge-shaped, 0.49-acre parcel. MAX light-rail tracks constrain the site on the west, and a massive underground culvert (following the historic path of Tanner Creek) bisects the site some 40 feet below grade.

Early subgrade work required crews from James W. Fowler Co. to perform a complex retrofit of the century-old brick culvert that channels the creek, stormwater and wastewater through the city center, Burges said.

“It’s an old creek that ran through Portland and it’s actually underneath here,” he said. “There are a bunch of buildings it runs underneath, but we had to structurally upgrade or retrofit 40 feet below ground surface.”

The work required personnel to don personal respirators and air monitors, Hoffman Construction project superintendent Mark Rado said. Also, a rescue team was on standby on the surface.

“They coated the galvanized steel plates and then went down there, bolted them up with five or six guys down below,” Rado said. “And they just feed these panels through and they build them up all the way. The existing (culvert) was a brick line or clay or whatever it was, and they would have an angular space between the existing structure and the steel plates and they had to grout to fill that in. So you have this reinforced creek now that is basically a 60-inch culvert.”

The culvert influenced the design of the building and limited the ability to excavate below grade. As a result, the project team settled on a single story of underground parking bolstered with car-stacking machinery. There will be an additional 278 bicycle parking spaces.

The building will feature a prominent “flatiron” corner at the junction of 18th Avenue and Salmon Street. The 85-foot-tall structure will have four stories of post-tensioned concrete decks below four stories of wood framing.

Ground was broken on the project in July 2019.

“Right now we’re basically trying to come up out of the ground to get to slab on grade,” Rado said. “We just got our first wall pour off on Monday, so a really critical path for us coming up out of the ground is getting all the walls formed and poured so we can go to backfill. That’s really our biggest push right now.”

Crews are finally enjoying decent weather conditions, Rado added.

“We had a really tough January underground with mud and muck and getting through that,” he said. “We survived because the water table is really low and we didn’t have to contend with too much water, but getting up enough to where we can get waterproofing done and get through the foundation – that was very difficult.”

With Hoffman crews also beginning construction on the new Lincoln High School across Salmon Street, communication and coordination are now essential.

“We have been eager to sink our teeth into the planning and coordination on this project,” Hoffman Construction Vice President Nima Darabi said. “It’s a complex site, but we look forward to partnering with Greystar and SERA Architects to deliver this pedestrian-oriented housing project. It will create a vibrant neighborhood focal point.”

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Major infrastructure upgrades are in the works for the city of Portland’s two major wastewater treatment plants in a project that’s expected to last for six years.

Canada-based Stantec is serving as owner’s representative on behalf of the Bureau of Environmental Services for the work at the Columbia Boulevard Wastewater Treatment Plant and the Tryon Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant. Both plants are more than 50 years old and in need of reliability, efficiency and capacity improvements, according to Stantec engineers and city officials.

“Both of these plants are aged infrastructure,” said Dick Talley, area manager for Stantec in Portland. “The Bureau (of Environmental Services) here five or six years ago did an assessment in terms of age and reliability, and in terms of their treatment efficiency and capacity. What came out of that was a series of capital improvements the facilities were needing.”

The Columbia Boulevard plant, near Heron Lakes Golf Club and Portland International Raceway, is the larger of the two plants and was completed in 1952. The Tryon Creek plant was built within the city limits of Lake Oswego and completed in 1965.

The two plants treat all of the city of Portland’s wastewater. Columbia Boulevard treats an average of 76 million gallons a day with a capacity of 450 million gallons per day, while Tryon Creek treats 6.5 million gallons per day on average, with capacity to treat 8.3 million gallons per day.

Talley compared the system to a root and branch map. Each building discharges to small pipes, which join larger pipes and eventually the wastewater treatment plants. The Columbia Boulevard facility discharges into the Columbia River, while Tryon Creek goes to the Willamette.

Stantec began working with the BES in August to oversee the projects. At Tryon Creek, a joint venture of Slayden and James W. Fowler Co. is serving as construction manager-general contractor. Black & Veatch and Carollo Engineers are the design engineering firms.

At Columbia Boulevard, Jacobs is on board as the design engineering firm. A CM-GC has yet to be selected.

Budgets have not been finalized, but hard construction costs are expected to reach approximately $80 million at Columbia Boulevard and $50 million at Tryon Creek, Talley said.

“They’re big projects in terms of capital dollars,” he said.

Construction isn’t expected to begin until mid-2020. Both project teams will face the complication of working while the plants run. Neither one can be taken offline.

At Columbia Boulevard, anticipated work includes improving secondary water treatment, rebuilding the odor control system and upgrading electrical systems.

“A lot of the electrical switchgear is 1950s, 1960s vintage,” Talley said.

Tryon Creek needs a more thorough rebuild, including replacement of the headworks and primary treatment equipment, improvement of the secondary treatment and odor control processes and replacement of electrical components.

“The end result is the plant will have little more capacity, a lot more efficiency and be more resilient,” Talley said.

Seismic work will also be done at both plants to ensure they can survive a sizable earthquake intact.

Stantec was selected to oversee the projects because “we felt their team and the firm’s experiences around the world in supporting the delivery of large capital programs using alternative delivery will provide the highest value to BES,” bureau program manager Muriel Gueissaz-Teufel stated in a news release.

Stantec is based in Edmonton, Alberta.

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