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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There is a towering presence taking up most of the space in a former greenhouse at Portland State University.

It’s a 44-foot-long, wooden, cable-stayed bridge model built by a team of undergraduate engineering students over the past six weeks as a practical learning exercise. The structure, modeled after TriMet‘s new Tilikum Crossing transit bridge, could also later serve as a teaching tool to inform high school students about engineering.

“We have a lot of projects with hands-on experience,” PSU civil and environmental engineering instructor Evan Kristof said. “Something always clicks when the students do hands-on projects. Something like this, where we’re modeling it after a real world structure – it always helps.”

Independent teacher Elliot Apatov, who has instructed Portland-area middle and high school students on bridge and crane building for nearly 20 years, initially conceived the project for younger students. When Lincoln High School, in Portland’s Goose Hollow neighborhood, didn’t have room for the bridge, he approached the dean of PSU’s Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science. This led to a partnership featuring Kristof and six engineering students to build on the PSU campus a large-scale bridge model with 12-foot-tall towers able to hold up to 9,000 pounds.

“It’s an engineering class, so we have to do it to the specs of a real bridge,” Apatov said.

After teaming up with PSU, Apatov secured donations from design and build companies to construct the model bridge. Lumber no longer needed for the Sellwood Bridge replacement project was provided by Slayden-Sundt, the joint venture of Slayden Construction Group and Sundt Construction. Other donations came from Portland Fasteners, West Coast Wire Rope, Metal Enterprises, John W. Negus Co. and KPFF Consulting Engineers.

“The industry people realize that teaching kids engineering and construction is very important,” Apatov said.

Because the completed bridge model occupies most of the space in the PSU greenhouse, it must soon move elsewhere to make room for materials testing and other regular engineering curriculum activities. Apatov is hoping to find the bridge a permanent home at a Portland-area high school where it can be used to demonstrate engineering concepts. He also is planning to create an educational video with PSU engineering students who will explain the basics of designing and constructing the bridge.

Apatov is not trained as an engineer, but he said his experience teaching and making furniture has served him well in developing a bridge curriculum for middle and high school students. In his classes, students build large-scale bridge models and test their capacity with weights. In another activity, a rope-and-wood “human suspension bridge” is formed – several students on either end experience compression forces while serving as towers holding up a student balanced on the deck.

“I don’t do Popsicle stick bridges,” he said.

In his years of teaching, Apatov said he’s learned that students are often most engaged when they can experience a concept firsthand rather than merely read about it.

“They learn that they need math to build a bridge,” he said. “If you screw it up, it falls down. They run the calculations, but when they actually do it, they believe that it happens.”

The same can be said for college-level engineering students, Kristof said. Building a scale bridge model helped his students see beyond textbooks and formulas.

“For the most part, it’s really abstract,” he said. “It blows their mind that what they’re doing actually translates into the real world.”

Kristof said recruiters for engineering firms often value recent graduates’ practical experience as much, if not more, than good grades.

“That’s what employers keep telling us; they want real world experience,” he said.

Namer Ezat-Agha, a junior in PSU’s civil engineering program, said helping build the model bridge solidified his career ambitions.

“I had never had this experience,” he said. “My idea was to go into structural engineering, so this gave one other positive push in that direction.”

Working on the bridge gave Ezat-Agha a renewed appreciation for the Tilikum Crossing and Sellwood Bridge projects under construction. He also was able to put to use what he learned in class.

“It was kind of cool actually applying what you learn in books,” he said.

While the model bridge was under construction, Ezat-Agha said he frequently sent pictures of it to his friends. He’s proud of what he and other PSU engineering students accomplished.

“I can say I built a bridge,” he said.

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The new Sellwood Bridge will start to look more like a bridge by the end of the week.

Starting tonight, 27 precast concrete girders as long as 109 feet and weighing as much as 75,000 pounds will be delivered by truck to the span’s eastern end. The bridge will be closed starting today at 7 p.m. through as late as Friday at 4 p.m., according to Multnomah County.

Knife River Construction prefabricated the girders with prestressed steel cables at a site in Harrisburg. After delivery, the project’s construction manager – Slayden Construction Group Inc. and Sundt Construction Co. – will install the girders by crane, said Mike Pullen, communications officer for the county.

“All you can see now is individual columns,” he said. “By Friday, they’ll be connected. A man could walk from the river’s edge to where the bridge starts on Sixth Avenue.”

The girders – horizontal beams that carry the weight of the bridge deck and pavement built on top – will form the southern half of the bridge’s east approach. The northern half of the east approach will be built later.

Prefabrication will allow installation of the girders in a tight space near residential neighborhoods, Pullen said. The girders are prestressed with steel cables providing tension.

“One thing (is) it’s like a factory,” he said. “It helps quality control. It also means that you don’t need as much space in restricted neighborhoods. We’d need to rent more land (otherwise).”

The $307.5 million project is on schedule, and the new bridge is expected to open in September 2015, Pullen said.

By the end of the year, retaining walls will be built along Oregon Route 43 so that traffic can be shifted and more room can be created for work on a two-level interchange under the bridge’s western span. Three steel arch spans will be installed in November, Pullen said.

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