Location: Clean Water Plant - Wyoming, MI Concrete Contractor: Davis Construction Concrete Supplier: Consumers Concrete Design Engineer: Black & Veatch Testing Company: Materials Testing Consultants Owner: City of Wyoming
The Wyoming Clean Water plant has the capacity to treat 42 million gallons of wastewater every day, with an average flow of around 14 million gallons on a typical day. Roughly 140,000 customers send their wastewater to this plant, mostly from properties and residents in the City of Wyoming and parts of four other surrounding communities.
The final step in the treatment process is disinfection, which in the past consisted of a dose of chlorine to ensure that the treated water can safely be returned to the Grand River. This $6.5-million project utilized an existing portion of an old holding tank area within the plant to build a new disinfection facility that now incorporates ultraviolet (UV) lights and aeration to disinfect the water instead of chlorine.
Approximately 1,000 cubic yards of concrete were used in the project, requiring the contractor, engineer, and supplier to coordinate access, forming, delivery, and pumping of the mix. The team worked seamlessly together to ensure the success of this very demanding project. The forming requirements and sloped walls called for excellent technical knowledge of forming techniques and exacting tolerances. The low-shrink mixes required the concrete supplier to have strict control of aggregate batching and water additions during the mixing and delivery process to maintain the tight tolerances and consistency of the concrete throughout the project pours.
The complex nature of the design, the tight tolerances necessary in the formwork, the sloped walls, and the need for them to be very accurate in their design and placement along with the technical nature of the low-shrink, low-water cement ratio concrete in this project define what a complex project typically is. Water treatment plants are not a new idea, but the technical demands of this project in the materials and skills needed to deliver this project qualify this project as award-worthy!
