While the rate of onsite accidents has declined slightly in recent years, OSHA reports that construction injuries cause an average of around $11.5 billion each year. Even worse, the construction industry has one of the worst rates of fatality on the job, with the Bureau of Labor Statistics reporting that 1,069 workers died on the job in 2022. On-site safety has always been a top priority for every job we do, and our line of work—designing, building, and maintaining water features, rockwork, and themed environments—presents added challenges. Extra caution must be taken to ensure that proper equipment is used for each job, and standard protective gear is utilized across all OTL projects. That said, unique jobs present unique challenges and often require creative and collaborative solutions. This was the case with one of the special projects we completed recently in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. When we were asked to design and construct a large-scale show fountain for EpicCentral, a new 172-acre entertainment district in Grand Prairie, Texas, we knew it would be a project unlike any other our team had done before. The site contained five existing interconnected lakes, most of which are lined with bentonite clay and utilized for the surrounding area’s irrigation and other needs. There were multiple aspects of the overall project site underway at the same time, and the project team knew there would be layers of complex coordination required to deliver the job as expected. What we couldn’t have known at the beginning were some of the unique safety challenges this project would present and the creative solutions we would need to devise and implement to overcome them. Building a Separate and Safe Site The show fountain, Illuvia, was to be constructed on a four-acre lake— the largest of the five—and would include air-fired jets and robotic nozzles to shoot water to heights of over 60 feet, along with large-scale video projection and specialty lighting effects choreographed to music. One of OSHA’s “Fatal Four,” the four leading causes of fatalities on construction sites, is electrocution. OTL is well-versed in working around water with electricity, and typically, a lake like this would be drained before beginning construction, so it would not be as much of an issue. In this case, because of the way this lake was being used—and a concern that if drained, the bentonite clay lining would dry out—we had to find a way to construct the fountain with water in the lake, which was also home to fish and fowl. In addition, this was a large construction site with structures already underway for one of the hotels and three of the restaurants, so coordination with other stakeholders was key to both safety and efficiency.
After careful consideration, the OTL team decided the best solution to build under these conditions would be to construct a barge that could serve as a platform for the work that was needed, creating an elevated and separate work site that would keep our team safe and dry. While using power tools and high-voltage welding rigs over a lake would still be complex, we were confident that the barge would be the most efficient approach, with the lowest safety risk.
Creative and Collaborative Solutions to Unforeseen Difficulties
The next challenge to solve for this project was how to drive the support piles for the fountain equipment into the lake bottom. We put our heads together and came up with a solution we had never tried before, or even seen someone else in our industry do, but we knew it could work. The barge had to be substantial enough to hold the 15-ton crane needed to drive piles 10 feet into the lake bottom. A second, 250-ton
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