Aquifer to Tap: Designing infrastructure to Supply a florida Community
Across the marvels of engineering, does any deliver the benefits of modern life like clean water at the turn of a spigot? Over two millennia ago, the gravity-fed aqueducts that transported water to Romans were a technical breakthrough. Today, potable water comes from a substantial network of water sources, pipes, and treatment plants few of us ever think about.
It’s something Pape-Dawson thinks about all the time, especially while water needs increase in the face of constrained resources. While the end goal, reliably supplying fresh water, might be the same across communities, the means are different in every case, depending on geography, hydrology, community makeup, and other factors.
For the City of Fort Myers in southwest Florida, mounting water demand means an ongoing endeavor to satisfy those needs. An important phase of that continuing project, drilling four wells and connecting them to the existing water infrastructure by 20,000 linear feet of pipe, fell to the Florida-based Pape-Dawson team. They served as Engineer of Record and conducted surveying, pipeline hydraulic modeling, civil site design, mechanical pipe design, and project management. As design team lead, Associate Vice President Alex Dunko, P.E., ENV SP, DBIA, also led the overall design effort and coordinated between hydrogeology, electrical, environmental, geotechnical, subsurface utility engineering (SUE), and grant funding specialties.
Having caused widespread power outages and well problems during past hurricanes, flooding is a central concern for this part of the state. “For that reason, one of the key aspects of this design was making sure that every wellhead was above the 100-year flood elevation,” says Alex. With that in mind, his team selected sites near the base flood elevation to minimize fill and grading requirements.
Even with that criterion, the City needed to guarantee water flow if power does go out. Many older wells can hook into a portable generator, but Alex presented the City with alternatives, as well. They chose to include an onsite generator with each well. “At the end of the day, it made the most sense to have generators permanently at the wells for a number of reasons: ease of use, not having to store the generator offsite, and not having to fight floodwaters when they need to bring them out,” says Alex.
A different complication was Fort Myers’ high density. “Fort Myers is basically 99.9% built out,” says Alex, so the City would need to locate its new wells and pipes in residential and commercial spaces, rather than in green fields. Although they sited one well at an existing City-owned aquifer storage and recovery (ASR) location, the other three wells are squeezed into the metro landscape: two at public schools, and the third at a City-owned site currently leased to a medical facility. Pipelines, likewise, stayed mostly in the City right-of-way, though some parts left the City and came under the jurisdiction (and separate processes) of Lee County. One part of the pipeline will run below a City golf course, and another small section crosses private property, which required an easement.
Permitting, which can prove complex with just one jurisdiction, became complicated because it spanned a variety of city, county, regional, and state agencies. “For example, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection permits the pipeline and the wells,” explains Alex. “The South Florida Water Management District also permits the wells because they limit how much water you can pull from the Lower Hawthorn Aquifer.” With an environmental consultant, Alex’s team navigated regulations to protect wildlife species such as the gopher tortoise and burrowing owl, as well.
Alex attributes much of the project’s success to its progressive design build (PDB) approach, which engages the entire team early to iteratively refine scope, schedule, cost, and design. Close coordination between engineers and the contractor, whom Fort Myers identified early, refined the rough initial plan. The PDB method allowed quick turnaround on a priority project, says Alex: “We designed the wells and pipeline within five months, where a traditional design-bid-build contract would be over a year, likely a year and a half to do that amount of work.”
Justin Frederiksen, P.E., Managing Vice President, Community Infrastructure, credits Alex for expertly synchronizing the enterprise. “Alex frequently met with the whole team, including the City, contractor, and consultants. He had to get answers right away to keep things on schedule.”
Pape-Dawson maintains a guiding influence through construction. Alex and his team continue project management, and they now conduct oversight of the inspections of well site and pipeline work. Due to their efforts, future Fort Myers residents will fill their glasses with water reliably brought from new wells through new pipes they’ve never thought twice about.