After Vermont’s record-breaking flash flood last July 10-11 that killed two people and caused an estimated $682 million in infrastructure damage, Benjamin Heath, civil construction manager for Engineers Construction Inc., received an emergency call from Burlington city officials that a 24-in. day sanitary sewer pipe had broken. Sewage was no longer entering the city’s treatment plant, and officials had little information about the underwater pipe that had leaked about 3 million gallons of sewage into the Winooski River.
As the city’s janitorial services contractor, the Williston, Vt.-based company’s team. led by Heath persuaded officials not to pump sewage into a nearby sanitary sewer, which gravity drains to the plant. Seemingly a “great solution, it risks overflowing and backing up sewage into residents’ basements,” Heath says. Instead, the team built a temporary pumping station on the south side of the river and then installed a mile-long temporary sanitary sewer pipe to the city’s wastewater treatment plant.
Heath used “design experience and his ingenuity to devise the plan to install nearly a mile of fused HDPE. [high density polyethylene] pipe above ground in five days,” says Ashley Walenty, the city’s water resources engineer. Heath also suggested designing a 2,500-gallon above-ground precast concrete tank, which would allow wastewater to discharge and flow slowly by gravity from the new pumping station to the existing one.” This slowed down the bypass pumping force [pipe] to a gravity system at the discharge point to ensure our fences were protected,” says Walenty.
Heath needed “the best idea that can happen now” to prevent sewage from entering the river and then flowing into Lake Champlain, he says. Designers were still working out the fluid dynamics math for the pipe and pump setup as crews headed to the site and the project team began procuring heavy-walled, heavy-duty HDPE fusion-welded pipe at butt
“We started calling our vendors and sent people driving all over New England with tractor trailers to pick up pipe directly from their inventories,” Heath says. Within 24 hours, the team had “a bunch of pipes showing up on site with fittings, valves, bends, labor and equipment,” he says.
The design was still incomplete when workers “began to melt the pipe through the ground in an alignment that went through private property, city property and various driveways on city streets,” Heath says.
The team also assisted with a month-long, $1.2 million river repair that brought the sanitary sewer pipe back into service on Nov. 8. This work required barges, divers and several excavators to locate the breach. “Divers were in the river driving excavators onto barges to help place straps to remove and eventually replace 125 feet of 24-inch-diameter ductile iron pipe in the river and an additional 100 feet from the riverbank to the discharge mouth.” says Walenty. This allowed the team to disable temporary bypass pumps and sanitary sewer piping to alleviate winter freezing issues for the air system.
Heath attributes his quick problem-solving ability to his civil engineering degree from the University of Vermont, where he trained to “learn everything I can about the problem quickly and develop a solution.”
Kevin McAleer, a transportation specialist with the Federal Highway Administration based in Montpelier, Vermont, has worked with Heath for more than 12 years on a variety of projects. “Heath is a help on time-critical projects,” he says. “When it was really important to get something right the first time, I trusted Ben.”
According to McAleer, Heath delivers “organized, well-knit and clear” projects.
