90 80
OHIO STATE EDITION
6
A Supplement to:
422
6 80 24
6
4
71
76
199 30 30 75
68
30 77
71 23 22 68
4
70 70
®
70
22 71
75
77
27
May 6 2017
22 74
50
50 25
Vol. XVIIII • No. 9
35
52
“The Nation’s Best Read Construction Newspaper… Founded in 1957.” Your Ohio Connection: Ed Bryden, Strongsville, OH • 1-800-810-7640
Akron Embarks on $1.4B Effort to Modernize Sewer System By Eric Olson
handles sink and toilet water flow. When a big rain event occurs, however, these low flows can increase a hundred-fold. “When that happens, in some of our sewers, we can go from 1 million gallons a day to as much as 40 or 50 million gallons a day,” he said. “Ninety-five percent or more is rainwater, but it is still considered sewage. So this work will improve our sewage flow and overall water quality.” The OCIT project is being managed by a joint venture of Kenny Construction in Chicago and the Obayashi Corporation, headquartered in Japan. Both firms are noted for their long history of civil engineering projects. Kenny, in particular, is a specialist in tunnel construction all over the world.
CEG CORRESPONDENT
Later this summer, a convoy of trucks will be moving into downtown Akron, Ohio, carrying huge pieces of what will eventually be a massive tunnel-boring machine. Once the pieces are put together, the machine will begin the process of boring a 6,240-ft. (1,901 km) long underground tunnel designed to funnel waste-water away from local waterways and into the city’s sewage treatment plant. The Ohio Canal Interceptor Tunnel (OCIT) is the largest element of the Akron Waterways Renewed Project, a $1.4 billion effort to modernize the city’s sewer system and improve water quality for residents in the Cuyahoga Valley. The $190 million OCIT will control sewer overflow from nine different locations along the Cuyahoga and the Little Cuyahoga rivers, along with their tributaries, and will store more than 25 million gallons of that overflow. A Four-Year Project Work on the OCIT project began Nov. 5, 2015, and, according to Akron city engineer Mike Wytrzyszczewski (known as Mike W.), plans call for sewage to begin running through the tunnel by Dec. 31, 2018. Other ancillary parts of the project, including rehabbing part of the Little Cuyahoga, will be finished in mid-2019. “We started work that first day doing some relocation of utilities and began the temporary relocation of the Akron Historic Tow-Path Trail in order to build the tunnelboring machine portal entrance, a 3½-yearrelocation,” he said. “The new sewer tunnel will pick up a lot of the trunk sewers that come through the downtown. Those are bigger sewer lines — ones that you could almost walk in.” The combined sewage also includes storm drains, Wytrzyszczewski said. On sunny days in Akron, the system experiences a dry-weather flow, meaning it primarily
Later this summer, a convoy of trucks will be moving into downtown Akron, Ohio, carrying huge pieces of what will eventually be a massive tunnel-boring machine.
Work to Happen Beneath the Downtown At depths of 70 to 160 ft. (21.3 to 48.8 m), the tunnel will be 27 ft. (8.2 m) in diameter and stretch from the Little Cuyahoga River north of the Mustill Store on the Ohio & Erie Towpath and connect to Lock 1 of the Ohio Canal at West Exchange Street in the heart of Akron’s business district. Wytrzyszczewski projects the tunnel-boring to begin in mid-August, but from the first day of the project until then, work has focused on getting the ancillary sewer lines installed — what he called “near-surface structures,” or anything above 30 to 40 ft. (9.1 to 12.2 m) deep. He said there are three main work sites within the entire project and around them lots of this near-surface work will continue through the end of next year. “They are diverting all of our old sewers that were tied in to our existing combined sewer tunnel,” he said. “We have to coordinate it all so that obviously the sewage does not go into the new tunnel before we are ready for it. In the process we are eliminating nine racks, or overflow points, that go into the local waterways.” Underground blasting was done from last November through mid-April to help crews install connections between shafts that feed see TUNNEL page 2