Blairsville Sanitary Sewer Seperation

Approximately 30 miles east of Pittsburgh, nestled along a sweeping bend in the Conemaugh River in Indiana County, Pennsylvania is the quaint and historic town of Blairsville. Blairsville is a picturesque borough with only a few stoplights and a nice town square made up of shops and quiet restaurants. The friendly residents live in close-knit neighborhoods where the space between driveways is small, but the sense of community is large. Beneath the community's streets, is an antiquated deteriorating combination storm and sanitary sewer that overflows into the aforementioned river after extreme precipitation events. This is where Independence Excavating comes in.

In late 2009, we were awarded an approximate 5.5 million dollar contract from the Borough of Blairsville to separate their storm and sanitary systems. The job was publicly bid, and we were very excited to be awarded this job. Blairsville, like many towns scattered across the land, will have to separate their sewer systems due to a mandate by the EPA. More and more of these jobs will be performed, but due to the foresight of the town's leaders, engineers and citizens, they are ahead of the pack. This has allowed the town a longer time to design and get a project underway than if regulatory agencies were putting pressure on them.

Because Blairsville is not "fighting the clock", as part of the contract we performed an initial "test pitting phase". On a typical sewer job, the entire system is 100% designed when we get to the site and start installing. Invariably there are numerous issues because previous as-built sewer systems are incorrect, manhole inverts haven't been verified, or there just isn't enough time to do the proper homework. These types of issues always end up costing the owner, the engineer and ultimately us. In this case, as part of the contract, we were paid to go through the town and perform approximately 300 test pits, where we core drilled the asphalt and used the process of hydro excavation to locate all types of utilities. This allowed the engineers to verify both location and elevation of a lot of the existing utilities. From that point, through a vigorous series of design meetings, we collectively developed a final design. This is a perfect example of all stake holders in the project working as a team to reach the ultimate goal as quickly and in the most cost effective way as possible. A big thank you to the officials at the Borough of Blairsville, Bankson Engineers, and Garvin Engineers for your "team first" attitude.

The final design and scope translates into a very nice sewer project for our company. Included in our scope is 27,000 LF of new sanitary sewer installation ranging from 6' to 21' in depth and 160 sanitary manholes of varying depths, 3,500 LF of storm sewer and 35 new inlets. Countless new wye connections to all the existing homes and businesses in the town are ancillary to the installation of these main lines. We will also install over 100,000 tons of 57 and 2A limestone material back into the ditch, so that the new pavement will hold up over time. Other activities that we will perform over the next several months include: cut and cap existing utilities, sidewalk removal and replacement, new curb, testing and camera imaging of the new lines, pavement repair, and landscape and restoration.

Some of the more difficult runs of pipe will be installed under PennDot owned streets that run through Blairsville. These runs will be especially challenging because of the maintenance of traffic and ensuring the safety of our crews and the public. We also have a very difficult run that passes under an 11' 9" tall railroad bridge, which will greatly limit the maneuverability of our equipment. Other challenges that face our crew's day in and day out are simply all of the unknowns. As we dig through this historic town to complete all of this new work, we are uncovering more water lines, gas lines, and sewer connections than anyone knew existed. As our excavators slice through the ground, every new cut is like opening a time capsule, revealing to us a rough timeline of how the old town must have been built. The crews are working very diligently and safely to maximize our production, but minimize the damage to existing utilities. This remains our biggest challenge.

In order to meet the aforementioned scope and challenges of the job, we will implement two mainline sewer crews and a third lateral crew. Also on site are several flaggers and a few "floaters" who handle the daily maintenance of our waste area, fueling and greasing, and overall job cleanliness. We expect peak manpower to be around 30 people. A special thank you goes out to the crews who will ultimately be the ones who get this job done. Thus far your effort, teamwork and diligence has been exemplary.

We are all very excited about this job as it is another opportunity for our company to perform a very challenging job in our new permanent market of Pittsburgh. We are working hard every day to do this job "locally", buying from local vendors and subcontractors and acting like we aren't just here for a short summer visit ' rather we are here to stay.