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| Before and after: As a subcontractor installing 4,800 lf of water and 3,900 lf of sewer pipe, Anchor Construction Corp. conquered a brutal 20-month stadium build schedule to meet the deadline and enjoy Opening Day. Photos courtesy of Jeff Saffelle |
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“You can go downtown and get utility maps that are on cloth,” Odom chuckles. “We take the drawings to be 50 percent accurate. It’s a matter of proceeding carefully, especially in the area [where the new stadium is located].
“One of the challenges on this project was that a number of communication lines have been added to the area over the past couple of decades,” Odom says. “They had to compete for space underground.” To address such issues ahead of time, Anchor brought in a Miss Utility locator for the duration of the project. The locator was able to update existing utility maps on the fly and mark and remark the utility path as work progressed. “It was money well spent when we factor the potential of lost crew time.”
As plans developed for the neighborhood surrounding the stadium, Anchor’s scope of work changed to meet the shifting needs. “We bid the job when the plans were at 30 percent,” Odom explains. “While we were working, we saw the 60-percent plans. I just got the 90-percent plans yesterday and we’ve been done with our part for weeks.”
Further challenges, such as working within ½ mile of the Capitol Building and the resulting safety and security considerations, were manageable given Anchor’s experience working in the district. “There are several communication lines that require notification of Homeland Security when we got close to them and [called for] the presence of uniformed federal police if they are breached or even accidentally broken,” Odom says, giving an example. “Thankfully, both [Anchor president] Florentino Gregorio and [executive vice president] Bill Custead took all these issues into account when bidding the job.”
Perhaps the biggest challenge came when Anchor ran the sewer line up to M Street. Though nearly all of the other work for the project was open-cut construction, M Street’s orientation as the last open east-west thoroughfare in the area due to construction meant that cutting the road open and further disrupting traffic would not be an option. Anchor decided to proceed beneath the street by microtunneling.
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