Rapid Repairs: Building on Relationships to Get Pump Station Back Online After Unexpected Damage

Solution

Through a series of established relationships between the city, the North Kansas City Levee District and Burns & McDonnell, city officials reached out to our team within hours of the weekend crash. By Monday morning, our team had arrived at the site to inspect the damage. It was quickly determined the city had two immediate needs: Install a temporary pump system, and initiate repairs to the building as soon as possible to get the pump station back up and running. After our assessment was complete, the city worked closely with the North Kansas City Levee District to make sure the area was safe from flooding and that the recommended repairs could be made immediately without additional contracts and funding upfront.

Four temporary pumps were installed to reinstate pumping services, but the additional cost per pump for the city was $7,127 each day and all four pumps combined were only able to pump 30,000 gallons per minute, which only equaled about one of the pumps inside the pump station. While the temporary pumps provided much needed relief for the city, repairing the pump station as soon as possible would be critical to save money and get the city back up to its previous pumping capacity.

“Throughout the project the nearby river was near the flooding level, and rain continued to be in the forecast. If a flash flood was to occur, the mobile pumps would not have been capable of handling that type of volume,” Hawver said. “The city’s storm sewer system would have backed up and created shallow flooding in certain areas of the city.”

It was quickly determined the most efficient way to get the station, which was built in the 1960s or late 1950s, back online was to repair it in the same manner in which it originally had been constructed. Bringing the building’s structural system up to current building code standards would have wasted critical time and was not necessary.

By relying on our own relationships with contractors and subcontractors, our team was able to save even more time by bypassing a general contractor. Through our relationships we were able to solicit the help of a highly skilled mason to do the brick repair work less than 48 hours after our arrival at the site. By Wednesday afternoon, the subcontractor and the team from Burns & McDonnell were sitting in a meeting with city hall officials, finalizing contractual details to get the repairs started.

The typical project timeline was further reduced by using an innovative approach for staining the bricks to match the existing color of the building, making it easier to secure approximately 16,000 bricks that were the same texture and size without being concerned about their color. The bricks arrived on-site just two days later.

Our staff also quickly began sketching out the repairs, quickly turning a napkin sketch into project drawings that were improved throughout the project timeline.

Results

The project was not only completed fast, it seamlessly matched the existing structure, leaving behind no evidence of the damage from weeks earlier.

Our team, and the city, made the conscious decision not to over-engineer the project and instead focused on right-sizing the repairs to get the building back to its original form as quickly as possible.

“Repair work began just two days after the accident. As a result, the repairs were made much sooner than the city expected because of the prompt response by the engineers, the contractors and their subcontractors,” Hawver said.

By relying on established relationships with the city, suppliers and subcontractors, Burns & McDonnell was able to complete a project that typically would have taken months in just four weeks, with substantial completion reached in the initial three weeks.