San Diego Water Resilience Project Wins Top Global Civil Engineering Award

SAN DIEGO, April 06, 2017 -- A project to increase water system resilience for San Diego County residents has won the prestigious 2017 Outstanding Civil Engineering Achievement Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). Black & Veatch delivered construction project management and design service on two of the four key facilities of the Emergency and Carryover Storage Project (E&CSP), which provides the region with up to six months of emergency water storage.

San Diego County Water Authority’s (SDCWA) $1.5 billion E&CSP project comprises several large dams, reservoirs, interconnected pipelines, pump stations and tunnels. The project provides water system resilience and reliability to the San Diego region if imported water deliveries are interrupted due to events such as prolonged drought or damaging earthquake. San Diego County imports more than 80 percent of its water from Northern California and the Colorado River. The innovative project adds 196,000 acre-feet of water storage to improve the reliability of regional water supplies in San Diego.

“The high-level operation of the E&CSP is vital in maintaining resilient and reliable imported water supplies for the San Diego region,” said Kevin Davis, Black & Veatch Associate Vice President and Project Director for the company’s involvement on the E&CSP. “This project is an outstanding example of holistic water planning, investment and building in flexibility to strengthen water system resilience.”

For the San Vicente Dam Raise, a project that more than doubled the storage capacity of the San Vicente Reservoir, Black & Veatch provided construction project management services as part of a joint venture team with Parsons. The project raised the original dam by 117 feet to a new height of 337 feet, resulting in a 152,000 acre-foot increase in reservoir capacity. It is the world’s largest dam raise using roller-compacted concrete.

Black & Veatch also designed the San Vicente Pump Station project, completed in 2010 as part of the E&CSP. This award-winning project facilitates reversal of flow that connects and moves water from the San Vicente Reservoir to SDCWA’s Second Aqueduct and to water agencies in the central and northern areas of the county.

Please click links to download photos of the San Vicente Reservoir

Editor’s notes:

• Among the finalists for the ASCE award were the One World Trade Center in New York City and the Pearl Harbor Memorial Bridge in New Haven, Connecticut.
• San Diego’s imported water supply system crosses three major faults of Southern California – the San Andreas, San Jacinto and Elsinore faults.
• The E&CSP was begun in 1992 as the Emergency Storage Project (ESP). The Carryover Storage Project was integrated as part of the ESP in 2004 to address drought impacts on the region.
• One acre-foot is nearly 326,000 gallons, enough water to supply two single-family households of four for one year.
• Black & Veatch also designed SDCWA’s award-winning Rancho Penasquitos Pressure Control and Hydroelectric Facility that is on the Second Aqueduct and helps to control flows. The facility, not generally considered to be part of the E&CSP, also uses excess pressure to generate renewable energy through a turbine-generator sized at 4.5 megawatts.
• The SDCWA sustains a $218 billion regional economy and the quality of life for 3.2 million residents through a multi-decade water supply diversification plan, major infrastructure investments and forward-thinking policies that promote fiscal and environmental responsibility. A public agency created in 1944, SDCWA delivers wholesale water supplies to 24 retail water providers, including cities, special districts and a military base.

About Black & Veatch
Black & Veatch is an employee-owned, global leader in building critical human infrastructure in Energy, Water, Telecommunications and Government Services. Since 1915, we have helped our clients improve the lives of people in over 100 countries through consulting, engineering, construction, operations and program management. Our revenues in 2016 were US$3.2 billion. Follow us at www.bv.com and on social media.

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