Project Implementation and Construction Sequencing with 93 Projects: The Baton Rouge SSO Program

The City of Baton Rouge/Parish of East Baton Rouge (City/Parish), Louisiana, has entered into a United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Consent Decree. The City/Parish designed and is implementing a sanitary sewer overflow (SSO) abatement program that involves conducting comprehensive rehabilitation and capacity improvements to the collection system. To implement the program, the City/Parish has developed the Program Delivery Plan (PDP), which describes the 93 projects needed to rehabilitate the system and increase its capacity. The PDP includes replacement of approximately 150 pump stations and nearly 2,000 miles of gravity and force main pipe. The PDP outlines 31 comprehensive rehabilitation projects, 57 capacity improvements projects, and 5 wastewater treatment and storage projects. Each of these projects requires sequencing to ensure that they work together to create a collection and treatment system that will work for the City/Parish into the future. For instance, a comprehensive rehabilitation project may include rehabilitation of a certain pipeline that needs to be included in a capacity improvement project, so the City/Parish needs to make sure that they do not rehabilitate a pipe that then will be replaced with a new, larger pipe in the near future. Within the capacity improvement projects, projects are split by geographic sewer basin. The projects are also divided so that pipelines are replaced in one project and pump stations are replaced in a separate project. Within the capacity projects, several inter-related projects can be encountered, with one pipeline project tied directly with a pump station project, and both of those projects related to upstream or downstream projects within the sewer basin. Therefore, scheduling of the projects is very important within the Program. This paper will discuss project construction scheduling that allows the SSO system to continue to operate while portions of the system are under construction. Two case studies explaining lessons learned will be discussed, including a case study with a pipeline project behind schedule that required pump stations to be tested without the discharge force main in place.