Santa Fe Activity Report

Water, Schools and Other Public Projects Dominate Region’s Work

The Buckman Diversion project marks one year since starting construction.

By Neal Singer and Scott Blair

Several projects are making waves in Santa Fe.

The region’s most significant project is the $216.3-million Buckman Direct Diversion Project, which is on schedule to bring water from the Rio Grande to moisten New Mexico’s overly dry capital city of Santa Fe and its surrounding area by early 2011.

A complex maze of reinforcing steel and support structures for the roof is being assembled for the finished water storage tank at the Buckman Direct Diversion Water Treatment Plant. Photo courtesy City of Santa Fe/Cooney Watson & Associates

The multistage, design-build, joint venture between Englewood, Co.-based CH2M HILL and Albuquerque-based Western Summit Constructors will divert, clean, pump and deliver as much as 8,730 acre ft of drinking-quality water annually from the Rio Grande.

The project, begun just over a year ago, is financed jointly by the city and county of Santa Fe and its Las Campanas subdivision.

“We have been extremely proactive in monitoring costs and addressing challenges that have occurred, including anticipating the cost of materials escalation,” says Rick Carpenter, Buckman’s project manager. The project is considered within budget because “As of September 1, about 54% of the project’s construction budget had been spent, while 54% of construction is complete.”

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Current construction includes a coffer dam on steel pilings, parallel to the river, far enough out to permit construction of a low-profile, 20-ft-wide intake structure to shepherd untreated water to a lift station. The bank-side diversion structure will have an intake peak capacity of 28 to 32 cu ft per second and will use screens to protect fish from being sucked in.

Crews are building a raw-water lift station with a below-grade pump station and above-grade mechanical and electrical equipment building. To blend with the environment, the pump building and two sides and the roof of the equipment building will be covered by soil and plantings.

Ray Selvy, the project’s general manager, says that using banks of 400- to 800-horsepower pumps to send water uphill 1,100 ft “can get pricey,” but the result should be well worth the cost to those serviced by the city and county water distribution systems.

A cast-in-place or prestressed concrete sand-removal facility with masonry walls and steel roofs will be colored to blend with their surroundings.

Buried pipelines 20 to 30 in. in diameter will bring water to two booster stations, built of reinforced concrete slabs and walls, muffled to minimize sound from the pumps. Each station will be capable of pumping 18.4 million gallons daily up to a water treatment plant designed in flatroofed New Mexico Territorial style that will feed into four buried pipelines.

An ecological problem involving bird habitats and nesting-season requirements briefly delayed commencement of the river diversion.

“But we’re currently working at all the locations, and we’re doing the best we can to get concrete and masonry work done prior to winter,” Selvy says.

One issue that’s been “surprisingly problem-free” was hiring good-quality craftworkers, Selvy says. “That may be partly because the economy has dried up workelsewhere and we’re paying the state prevailing wage on the project,” he says. Selvy currently has 200 people working on the job, which will use approximately 13,000 cu yds of concrete and a variety of structural and reinforcement steel.

Among the equipment needed to purify the river water are two Gunite concrete-lined earthern basins to allow larger particles to settle for removal. The extremely small pores of a membrane filtration system will remove small suspended solids and threats such as giardia.

Remaining organic material will be oxidized by ozone, and five 40-ft-long, 12-ft-diameter pressurized tanks containing granular activated carbon will absorb unwanted by-products before chlorine is added for further disinfection.

Another sizable project is the $12.5 million elementary school building under construction in Santa Fe. It will function as a teaching instrument of its own, says Sandy Bosben, director of development at Santa Fe-based general contractor Cameron Construction.

The 64,000-sq-ft Amy Biehl school, located on the south side of Santa Fe in Rancho Viejo and approved by the Santa Fe Board of Education, will be built of conventional-enough materials. It will have a concrete foundation, metal framing, and stucco, says Mark Kerr of Albuquerque-based Greer Stafford SJCF architects.

But, hoping to achieve a silver LEED rating, the northern pueblo design includes clerestory windows to bring daylight into every classroom.

Rainwater harvested from the building’s sloping roofs will be collected in cisterns, then used by students to grow vegetables that, hopefully, they will eat for lunch, says architect Chris Rasmussen of the same architectural firm.

A buried closed-loop heat pump system has been proposed to use the earth’s temperature stability to inexpensively moderate the building’s temperature during extremes of summer or winter temperatures.

Photosensors will turn down lights automatically on bright days and the temperature in each classroom will be controlled by teachers. Low-VOC finishes and furnishings will help to keep the indoor environment as healthy as possible.

Construction on a significant downtown Santa Fe project, the $38-million Steve Herrera Judicial Complex, was put on hold this summer after the discovery of free phase hydrocarbons in the soil, related to gasoline contamination in part from former gas stations in the area. Demolition of the site’s existing structures had been completed and excavation had begun when test wells dug by the project’s owner, Santa Fe County, and the New Mexico Environment Department, detected the substance.

The $12.5-million Amy Biehl at Rancho Viejo Elementary School building under construction in Santa Fe is designed to be LEED silver, with a northern pueblo design that includes clerestory windows to bring daylight into every classroom. Photo courtesy Cameron Construction

“The contamination is a community problem that extends beyond the County Courthouse site,” says Mike Anaya, chairman of Santa Fe County’s Board of Commissioners.

As a result, Governor Bill Richardson directed the Environment Department to take the lead in the cleanup. The department’s petroleum storage tank bureau chief Jim Davis says the remediation should begin this month and continue through the winter, with construction possibly resuming the early part of March.

Davis says crews will drill a number of vapor extraction wells along with three horizontal wells under the adjacent District Attorney’s building. “Two will be vapor extraction wells and the third will be a hot air injection well where we will inject high temperature air into the subsurface to help mobilize the gasoline vapors in the subsurface,” he adds. “We’ll use a heat exchanger from the thermal oxidizer unit that we use to burn the vapors and capture that heat energy, using it to heat the air that we will inject underground.”

Once construction resumes, Albuquerque-based general contractor Bradbury Stamm Construction will build the 103,000-sq-ft facility to house eight courtrooms and two hearing rooms.

With soil remediation just getting underway to clean up thousands of gallons of petrochemicals from an underground storage tank leak near the site for Santa Fe County’s new courthouse, officials expect construction to resume by spring. Image courtesy NCA Architects

The design by NCA Architects of Albuquerque establishes safe circulation patterns to maintain the security of judges, defendants and the public by keeping them separate from each other. The basement level will feature an in-custody sally port and holding areas that include secure vertical circulation to courtrooms.

The exterior design took into consideration the surrounding historic structures in downtown Santa Fe. A plaza features shade trellises and portals while a colonnade along Sandoval Street creates covered pedestrian access.

Johnny Rehders of Santa Fe-based Verde Sustainable Design Consultants, the project’s LEED consultant, says the project is targeting gold certification. During demolition, crews recycled 78% of the waste material. Other features include underground water cisterns to catch rainwater, 50% use of Forest Stewarship Council wood, low-E glazing and operable windows plus points for redeveloping a brownfield site.

Key Players

Buckman Direct Diversion Project
Owner: City of Santa Fe; Santa Fe County
Design-Build: CH2M Hill/Western Summit Joint Venture
Engineer/Consultant: Camp Dresser and McKee Inc.

Amy Biehl at Rancho Viejo Community School
Owner:Santa Fe Public Schools
Architect: Greer Stafford/SJCF Inc.
GC: Cameron Construction

Judge Steve Herrera Judicial Complex
Owner: Santa Fe County
Design Firm: NCA Architects
General Contractor: Bradbury Stamm Construction
Construction Manager: Gerald Martin Construction Management

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