Houston, TX

Ardurra served as Program Manager for the development of 23.6 miles of earthen open canal to convey the raw water to Lake Houston. As the Lead Canal Designer for this $120M project, we managed five separate engineering teams, consisting of nearly 30 engineering consultants. Ardurra also designed the downstream segment which included the drop structure, one water control gate, seven siphon crossings, one bridge, one TxDOT crossing, and coordination of crossings for three pipeline corridors.

In managing these segment teams, we were responsible for overall quality management, outside agency coordination, and project controls including project schedule and cost management.

Intricate coordination was required with other consultants including oil and gas pipeline coordinators, pump station access road design consultants, SCADA consultants, private bridge design consultants, maintenance facility design consultants, electrical power design consultants, and pipeline design consultants.

Ardurra managed field investigations including engineering surveys and soils testing, and the analyses for elements applicable to the overall canal design, which include: standards development, investigations and recommendations for the specialty water level control gates, investigation of two irrigation systems, extensive landowner coordination and right-of-entry permitting, geotechnical fault investigation, canal hydraulics modeling, and construction planning. The canal is designed to maintain a constant water depth through a series of five water level control gates.

During the engineering of the project, several unique challenges were identified and overcome. These included:

• Strategically managing and balancing the earthwork in order to control and reduce construction costs
• Analysis of the entire corridor drainage patterns to reduce the number of drainage crossing structures
• Minimization of impacts to adjacent property owners such as rice farm irrigation systems by designing drainage crossings at strategic locations and designing distribution
• Designing automatic level control gates so that the gates close when pumps are turned off at the pump station. These five control gates are the largest in the State of Texas.
• Managing procurement of water control gates to ensure the utilization of one gate manufacturer across all construction projects
• Put in private bridges for landowners who had property on both sides of the canal