Underground obstacles to stormwater management
Flexibility of plastic chambers saves time and money in convenience store construction. By Thomas Renner
All successful businesses seek to save time and money, whether it’s manufacturing, automobile production, or widget making. Construc- tion executives are no different. Scott Tonitis of Elite Development Services saw an opportunity to save both in the early stages of a project in Sarasota, Fla.; his expertise saved $500,000 and expedited construc- tion of a new 24-hour convenience store by several months. Tonitis’ task was to install a stormwater management system on a two-acre site for general contractor Gates Construction. The site posed several challenges — some known, others totally unforeseen — and Tonitis called the job the most labor intensive during his 33-year ca- reer as a Certified Underground Utility Contractor. Tonitis solved the difficult job — and accomplished huge savings — by recommending plastic stormwater chambers instead of the concrete structures that had been originally proposed. “I thought the plastic chambers would be the best system to install and there wouldn’t be any problems down the road,” Tonitis said. “It made the most sense. When the owner found out how much money it could save, he was all for it.” Gates is constructing a Wawa market on the site. Wawa, an iconic East Coast brand, has more than 700 stores in Florida, Pennsylvania, Dela- ware, Maryland, New Jersey, and Virginia. The first Wawa opened in 1964 in Folsom, Pa., a suburb of Philadelphia. The chain’s name comes from the site of the company’s first milk plant and corporate head- quarters in Wawa, Pa. Now based in Philadelphia, the convenience store chain opened its first store in Florida in 2012 and has expanded aggressively in the state. Nearly 200 Wawa stores are expected to be open in Florida by 2022. The new Sarasota Wawa is expected to open in October 2018. Very few, however, will pose the site challenges that Tonitis encoun- tered in his Sarasota project. In almost every phase of construction of the stormwater management system, the Elite Development Services team faced obstacles that needed creative solutions and products that offered flexibility. The site where Wawa sought to construct the store included Baer’s
The underground stormwater management system had to be designed around numerous utility vaults and landscaping obstacles.
Furniture Store. The store needed to remain open during construction, which dramatically reduced the imprint in which Elite workers could store and use their equipment. In addition, the lot included several ex- isting drainage ponds. To add more parking spaces for Wawa, some of the ponds needed to be filled in. While that challenge was routine, especially for Florida, more obsta- cles became present when Tonitis and his team started to dig trenches for the stormwater chambers. “There was a lot of existing landscap- ing, trees, and utility valve vaults. We knew about some of them,’’ he said. “Others we did not. We had to go around them and modify the system as we went. We installed the system according to the engineer’s requirements for water storage, but we had to get creative in how we solved it.” The original system design called for concrete chambers. But when Tonitis discovered the utility vaults and landscaping obstacles, he rec- ommended plastic stormwater chambers manufactured by CULTEC. Tonitis had used CULTEC products in past applications and he knew their flexibility, versatility, and availability could solve the issues he discovered in Sarasota. “The concrete products would not have been available for months, so I knew we could get it done much more quickly with the CULTEC products,” Tonitis said. “The concrete vault system was about two and a half times more costly than the CULTEC system and it would save about 50 percent on labor costs. I told the owner we could save about a half million dollars by using the plastic chambers. He was thrilled.” The underground electrical vaults proved particularly troublesome — and dangerous. While some had been known before the project’s construction, others were not known. There were also fire suppression
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may 2018
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