The Omohundro Water Treatment Plant in Nashville, Tennessee features brick arches, stained wood plank ceilings and green and white checkerboard terrazzo flooring. Three of the seven high-service pumps are original. Under the operating floor, you can see walls of stone brick believed to be repurposed from an old Civil War fort, stamped with the year 1873. This National Register of Historic Places facility and its counterpart, the KR Harrington Water Treatment Plant, have been serving the Nashville area since 1889 and 1978, respectively. Both plants were in need of a facelift, and the upgrades that Sundt is making will allow the city to continue providing safe, high-quality drinking water to Nashville-area residents and visitors.
The efforts of the first phase are focused at the KR Harrington campus where the team is refurbishing 18 filters, resurfacing all concrete walls and demolishing the existing underdrain system, which will be replaced with a new Orthos underdrain system. Once complete, the new system will increase the filter run time by approximately 300 percent and achieve Metro Water Service’s rigorous water quantity and quality standards.
“The unique challenge for many of our water/wastewater treatment projects is that the plants need to remain operational to continue providing critical water services to the community,” said David Rieken, regional vice president for Sundt’s water/wastewater market in the Southeast. “Our priority is delivering the best product for our clients without compromising the quality of the water through construction, and Sundt has gotten exceptionally good at this due to our expansive résumé of water/wastewater work across the country.”
As of April, the self-perform crew has placed concrete on 15 of the 18 filters. “Each of the 36 cells requires the same treatment, so right now the construction process is just a matter of rinse and repeat for each cell,” explained Project Engineer Patricia Mason. “Because of this, our crew has become extremely efficient, allowing us to shave months off of our initial proposed timeline.”
“I believe work is going to require our team to put their skills to the test,” said Mason. “We will begin with packages such as tree removal and stream relocation, and our team will have to support where needed, perhaps in areas outside of their typical scope. But they’re eager and willing to learn, which has been the key to our successes so far.”
The first phase of the Omohundro and KR Harrington Water Treatment Plants’ renovation project, the filter rehab at KR Harrington, is about 75 percent complete. Work on renovating the older Omohundro WTP is underway as of early this year, which will expand process treatment capacity from 90 million to 120-150 million gallons per day through improvements at the coagulation, pre-sedimentation basins, filters and chemical facilities. Other upgrades include converting space into offices and conference rooms, as well as construction of a new 120 MGD raw water pump station, a post-filter granular activated carbon adsorber facility, a 6 million gallon clear well, a 120 million gallon capacity high-service pump station and reservoir crew facilities.
See more of Sundt’s water and wastewater projects here.