Challenge
A general contractor was tasked with making major renovations to a utility company’s electrical transmission infrastructure. This massive project occurred on 70 acres of public and private land over a period of 6 months. The renovations required the excavation of 30 sites to install new foundations and access vaults to support future infrastructure. Construction dewatering was a major concern for the general contractor because the excavations were as close as 500’ from the ocean.

Solution
Envent’s engineering team thoroughly investigated the exploratory borings that were performed across the site to analyze the soil conditions. Based on the conditions of the site, a dewatering plan was developed. Permitting the installation of wells was smoothly addressed by Envent’s engineering team. Wells were then installed at the excavation sites to remove groundwater prior to excavation operations. The groundwater was collected into several water treatment systems, located across the extents of the project. Local discharge locations had been evaluated and the sewer system was determined to be the most feasible option to discharge the treated groundwater. Envent’s engineering team coordinated with local regulatory organizations to ensure that the discharge permit was satisfied prior to the discharge of treated water. The water treatment systems were designed in accordance with local regulatory organization requirements for water treatment systems. The treatment systems included settling tanks, filtration vessels, and activated carbon treatment systems to address all known and expected contaminants of the site.

Benefit
The true benefit of treating water on-site is demonstrated by a project of this scale. There is always some degree of uncertainty when it comes to the flow rate of water that any given dewatering well can produce. The critical benefit of Envent’s dewatering and treatment system is that the savings would have scaled relative to the amount of groundwater produced – regardless of the quantity. In this case, the general contractor saved nearly $1,800,000 – when compared to transporting the water off-site. More importantly, the general contractor would have continued to save, even in the unexpected cases of higher groundwater flow rates and rain events