Wes currently serves as Alabama Water Team Leader for Garver. He brings a passion for wastewater treatment and providing solutions to clients that not only consider cost, but the entire life-cycle of the facility with particular attention on necessary operational and maintenance considerations that maximize reliability and provide the necessary resiliency that our wastewater treatment facilities require. Over his 12-year career, Wes has primarily focused on wastewater process design and operational improvements. His detailed design experience includes all phases of wastewater treatment, from headworks to disinfection, and all aspects of solids handling and treatment.

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Matt Reynolds currently serves as Operations Superintendent for the City of Huntsville Water Pollution Control department. His responsibilities include oversight of operations and maintenance staff as well as capital improvements planning for each of Huntsville’s six wastewater treatment facilities, ranging in size from 0.25 MGD to 41 MGD. Matt is a licensed professional engineer, Grade IV wastewater operator, and graduated from Auburn in 2008.

With over 215,000 residents in the Huntsville City limits and almost 500,000 in the metro area, Huntsville is the most populous city in Alabama and one of the fastest growing in the region. Part of that growth comes from the fact that Huntsville is home to myriad industries — and the facilities that support them — including the Redstone Arsenal, NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, the U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Command, the FBI’s operational support headquarters, and a new Mazda-Toyota manufacturing plant. To support these industries and recruit additional industries to the area, a reliable wastewater collection and treatment system with sufficient capacity in place is critical.

Much of this growth is expected to occur for the western portion of the City’s existing service area. Wastewater from this area is collected and treated at the Western Area WWTP – a 20 MGD conventional activated sludge facility that was approaching capacity. In 2017, Garver completed a capacity study and buildout plan for the Western Area WWTP. This study identified the facility’s current capacity, based on existing influent wastewater conditions, and developed a phased expansion plan to meet the anticipated buildout capacity necessary to support the growth within the service area. Because this growth was occurring much faster than the previous planning efforts had anticipated, it was determined that construction of the first phase of the expansion must begin as quickly as possible – pandemic or not.

As we’re all too aware, the pandemic significantly impacted the water and wastewater industry. Supply chain issues and price volatility have created many challenges for utilities, and planned capital improvement projects have been delayed or scaled back to meet available budget constraints. For the City of Huntsville, this wasn’t an option, as the Huntsville metro area was the only large metro in Alabama to see steady growth throughout the pandemic. This meant that expansion of the Western Area WWTP was still necessary, despite the hurdles of material/equipment availability and associated pricing volatility.

The City of Huntsville teamed with Garver to proceed with design and construction of the first phase of the Western Area WWTP expansion. This project will increase the treatment capacity of the WWTP by 5 MGD through an additional treatment train, as well as necessary rehabilitation of several existing processes including the headworks, splitter boxes, and RAS/WAS pump station. To compensate for supply chain issues and market volatility and to begin the construction effort as quickly as possible, Garver developed a unique design and project strategy to mitigate these issues.

This strategy called for an accelerated design schedule with a purpose-built approach to reduce delays and mitigate pricing volatility, including:

• Reduced Design Submittals
• Equipment Pre-Selection and Pre-Purchasing:
• Early Material Procurement
• Bi-Weekly, Interactive Design Review Meetings:
• Early Bidder Interaction

This project was successfully bid in July 2022, with construction beginning in August 2022.

This presentation will focus on each of the approach elements and provide attendees with an overview of the initial buildout evaluation, details of the design and bidding process, and an update based on the ongoing construction effort.