Environmental Challenge

Industry Tackles Large Projects

by Tom Stabile

The New York region’s current construction boom isn’t just adding condominium buildings, subway lines, and Manhattan office space. It’s also providing a high water point for the heavy civil construction sector, where giant environmental projects of every shape and size are under way, with more to come.

The workload is a mix of a normal cycle – the need to retrofit plants built decades ago – with modern factors, such as higher water quality standards, the shipping marketplace demanding deeper marine passageways, and real estate developers eager to reclaim contaminated sites.

Both the design and construction sides are benefiting, says Jim Fagan, president of Hazen and Sawyer, an engineering firm in New York. He says that a survey of his peers at a recent seminar run by Paul Zofnass of New York-based Environmental Financial Consulting Group drew a rosy projection.

“The consensus of the CEOs at his meeting is that the market is the strongest it’s been in the last five years,” Fagan says. “They see a tremendous amount of work going forward, as do we.”

The roster of projects in the works in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut is a clear sign, starting with a $17 billion capital plan for the New York City Department of Environmental Protection [see related article]. Its roster includes a $4 billion upgrade and expansion of the Newtown Creek water treatment facility in Brooklyn, a $1.24 billion water filtration plant in the Bronx, and hundreds of millions of dollars for Water Tunnel No. 3.

Other projects include: Hartford’s water and sewer authority planning a $1.6 billion upgrade of its network; various dam rebuilding projects in Upstate New York; and dozens of projects planned on landfills and brownfields, including billion-dollar plans in New Jersey’s Meadowlands area and a $656 million redevelopment of a former gas plant site in downtown Hartford. In the water, New York Harbor is the site of a $1.6 billion deepening effort overseen by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. They are dredging 35- to 45-ft-deep channels to 50 ft to handle new, bigger supertankers.

The projects are giant in scale and schedule, with most of the current work slated to continue construction through 2010 and beyond. The dredging project is slated to finish in 2014, for instance.

In the wastewater sector, stricter federal and state requirements are joining with the need to renovate a generation of plants built 30 and 40 years ago to create a construction traffic jam.

“It was quieter 10 years ago when those facilities were in their useful lives,” Fagan says. “A lot of them are reaching the end. There’s some expansion but most is rehabilitation and upgrades to meet ever-increasing regulatory requirements.”

The main focus is upgrading treatment plants to capture more contaminants and to patch weak spots in combined sewer overflows, or CSOs, which aim to curb flooding during heavy rainfalls.

One of the biggest regional programs to address CSO problems is in Hartford, which has a multiyear $1.6 billion plan to upgrade sewer plants, lines, and other systems. The project will respond to a consent decree that the Metropolitan District Commission, which runs the system, signed with state and federal environmental authorities to address overflows. It entails installing 60 mi of new lines to collect stormwater separately from sanitary sewage, among other measures.

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“It would appear that the U.S. Department of Justice and [Environmental Protection Agency] are taking action against a lot of communities,” he says. “If you take a poll of mid-sized cities in the country, you would find that most have CSO programs in the billion dollar range.”

New York City is addressing CSO issues by building holding tunnels or basins that capture stormwater for a slow release into the sewer system, Fagan says.

Hartford’s authority is also addressing another federal priority – the removal of nitrogen from effluent leaving treatment plants. It will spend about $150 million  to upgrade a plant on the Connecticut River, which flows into Long Island Sound, where there are high nitrogen levels. Likewise, New York City’s environmental agency is spending $800 million on nitrogen removal equipment at four plants that send effluent to the Sound.

Landside, there is a spike in the number of brownfields that developers are willing to reclaim, because the cost of cleanup is increasingly justified by development profits, says Jim Heeren, a senior environmental engineer in New Jersey for Dewberry of Fairfax, Va.

“The whole urban renewal process is being helped by the brownfields incentives that states are sponsoring,” he adds.

Heeren says he has seen brownfield projects even in suburban locales such as Boonton, N.J., which have natural advantages such as proximity to highways, as well as the lure of development on landfills that 10 years ago were lost sites.

In the longer run, the busy cycle may tail off on the wastewater side, Fagan says.

“We will build some of these facilities and then be in a maintenance mode,” he adds. “There isn’t tremendous population growth in this area.” 

But new requirements could require more construction overall. For instance, New York now has to build water disinfection plants at the supply point for the first time, says Frank McArdle, past executive director of the General Contractors Association of Greater New York.

“These have no real parallel in history,” he adds.

Hartford’s Weimar says the rules may well keep getting stricter.

“It’s fair to say that we expect that the regulatory requirements will continue to increase and that additional investments will be needed in the future,” he says.