Houston Light-Rail Project Drives Full Steam Ahead

Harris County selects joint venture team to expand existing light rail transit system; also, rain-water harvest program earns ISD kudos.

Boerne ISD Develops Rainwater Harvesting Program

L to R: Sen. Kip Averitt, District 22, Chair Senate Committee on Natural Resources; House Rep. Byron Cook, District 8, Chair Environmental Regulations Committee; Jeff Haberstroh, Boerne ISD Construction Bond Administrator; Gov. Rick Perry; Melissa Haberstroh; Buddy Garcia, Chairman, Texas Commission on Environmental Quality; Larry R. Soward, Commissioner, TCEQ; Bryan W. Shaw, Commissioner, TCEQ.

Looking to save money while creating a sustainable practice, the Boerne Independent School District created an innovative new Rainwater Harvesting Program that is not only saving them around $48,000 a year, but also earned them kudos across the state.

The Boerne Independent School District’s Boerne-Samuel V. Champion High School received the state’s first honors for excellence pertaining to water conservation by the governor and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

Under the Waste Reduction Policy Act of 1991, the TCEQ initiated the Texas Environmental Excellence Awards in 1993. Presented every spring, the awards spotlight the state’s highest achievements in environmental preservation and protection. Boerne Independent School District won the 2009 Texas Environmental Excellence Award in the newly created water conversation category.

“The Rainwater Harvesting Program is the first and only of its kind in Texas school systems,” Jeff L. Haberstroh, BISD construction bond administrator, told Texas Construction.

Developed by Haberstroh and architects for the project Kent Neimann, Mark Oppelt, and landscape designer Alex Garza the innovative water harvesting network at Boerne High School combines two elevated storage tanks and heating, ventilating, and air conditioning condensate with an 800-foot long underground pipe that’s five feet in diameter.

Together, the system can hold 224,000 gallons of water, with the potential of saving the school district an estimated $48,000 per year. Officials estimate that the project should pay for itself in less than five years.

The rainwater harvesting system is used to irrigate the athletic fields and natural landscaped areas at Champion High School.

“One of our challenges in the Hill Country is water. We actually had a very small 25,000-gallon elevated storage tank, which served as an architectural feature in addition to accumulating water,” Haberstroh says. “We began exploring sustainable opportunities and it started growing legs, so to speak. Our site was a historic family ranch that was divided up and we purchased 140 acres out of 600. Our site was pretty flat in a valley and we had to get our storm water drainage underground to have that delivered to a seasonally dry creekbed to manage flood waters.”

Haberstroh adds that during the design of the underground pipes, the idea occurred to hold that stormwater and use it for irrigation. Not only would it be green, but it would save money and defer expenses, he says.

“This is a pretty unique project,” Haberstroh says. “We had a challenge of water storage above ground with those types of tanks costing about $1 to $1.25 per gallon. Our underground system because we leveraged something we had already purchased as part of the project winds up only costing us about 40 cents per gallon.”

The irrigation loop was leveraged to connect the campus with all the surfaces that have to be irrigated, which is about a five mile loop, he says. That also serves as the recirculation system. The main is always pressurized and recirculates that water through that main so it stays aerated so the stored water is safe, he says.

The system has a sophisticated design with a variable speed pump that drives the irrigation system. The pump needed to be water proof, too, so the system can never run dry, Haberstoh says.

“We have a computerized automated building management system that monitors the water, so when it reaches low trigger point, it automatically delivers potable water through the irrigation water meter,” he adds. “Because that water is used to maintain the athletic fields, the system will automatically get water from the city as needed.”

Through modeling with information from the National Weather Service and an existing high school in BISD, Haberstroh determined that the high school uses about 500,000 to 800,000 gallons of water in a year with normal rainfall and about 1.8 million to 2.3 million gallons of water during a drought.

In April and May, the school district didn’t have to purchase any water to irrigate the 100-acre campus, he says.

“The board authorized us to spend $350,000 to implement the system, we brought that portion in under budget at $265,000; our estimated annual savings for the modeling was $35,000 to $38,000 per year, but it is turning out to be about $48,000 per year,” he says.

Joint Venture Awarded $1.3-Billion Houston Light Rail Project

A joint venture team earned a contract with an overall value of $1.3 billion for the design and construction of the light rail expansion project in Houston. The award was made by the Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County (METRO). The joint venture team on the design/build project is led by Parsons Transportation Group Inc. of Houston and includes Granite Construction Company of Lewisville, Kiewit Texas Construction LP of Houston and Stacy and Witbeck, Inc. of Alameda, Calif. Granite’s portion of the total contract is 34 percent.

The joint venture team will be operating under the name of Houston Rapid Transit Joint Venture. HRT will be responsible for expanding the existing light rail transit system in four new corridors totaling an additional 20 miles of light rail transit. The contract includes 32 stations, storage and inspection facilities and a major renovation to the existing operations center. Three of the new corridors will be located in and adjacent to downtown Houston and one will be in the Galleria area.

A significant portion of the initial work is expected to be subcontracted to local small and disadvantaged business enterprises. The award of this contract culminates 24 months of pre-construction services and design development provided by HRT working in close collaboration with Houston METRO. No time frame for the project was announced.

Oklahoma, Texas Environmental Offices Receive Stimulus Funding

In an effort to improve water quality and create jobs, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency made a partial award of $191,880 to the Oklahoma Office of the Secretary of the Environment under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, commonly known as the ARRA or stimulus act. The EPA also awarded $1.8 million to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

A total of $39 million will be awarded nationally to states for Water Quality Management Planning, or WQMP, grants, which will keep and create jobs to help prevent water pollution and protect human health and the environment.

Oklahoma has also been approved for an additional $127,920 in WQMP funding, which will be awarded soon. These funds were approved after the state met further grant requirements.

WQMP grants support a broad range of activities, such as setting standards, monitoring the quality of the water, developing plans to restore polluted waters, and identifying ways to protect healthy waters from becoming polluted. States are also encouraged to use these funds for more innovative planning activities like developing plans to adapt to climate change, analyzing trends in water availability and use, and creating low-impact development programs.

Texas Water Development Board Allocates $44 Mil for Projects

The Texas Water Development Board approved financial assistance totaling $44 million for a variety of projects as loans and grants. Include in the funding is a $3.7 million loan from the Clean Water State Revolving Fund to finance water and wastewater system improvements, utilizing the pre-design funding option to the city of Hutchins; a $20-million loan from the Water Infrastructure Fund to finance construction of a water supply project, utilizing the pre-design funding option to the city of Lubbock; and a $333,000 grant from the Economically Distressed Areas Program and a $322,000 loan from the Texas Water Development Fund for a total of $655,000 in assistance to finance wastewater system improvements, utilizing the pre-design funding option to the city of Portland.

Port of Houston Awards $16.5 Million Contract for Yard Cranes

The Port Commission of The Port of Houston Authority, or PHA, recently approved up to $20 million for Bayport projects, which includes the design of a Marine Emergency Building and the purchase of nine diesel electric container cranes, as well as the installation of Transportation Worker Identification Credentials, or TWIC, readers at gates at Barbours Cut and Bayport container terminals.

Commissioners approved awarding a contract to Houston-based Konecranes Heavy Lifting Corp. for nine diesel electric container yard cranes for Bayport Container Terminal for $16.5 million.

The commissioners also approved advertising and receipt of competitive sealed proposals for construction of a Marine Emergency Building at Bayport Container Terminal. The Port Commission previously engaged Prozign Architects of Houston to design the facility, which is expected to offer about 4,600 sq ft. The total cost is expected to range between $1 million and $5 million.

Also approved was awarding professional services contract to Houston-based Shrader Engineering Co. Inc. for TWIC implementation at the Barbours Cut and Bayport gates for $226,345. The design will provide for changing out the existing driver’s license readers to TWIC-compatible readers, installation of associated equipment and cabling at the pre-check entry gates, entry and exit gates for Barbours Cut and Bayport.

Search on for Sources of Benzene in Houston Ship Channel Area

Earlier this year, a Bell Jet Ranger helicopter flew over many industrial facilities in the Houston Ship Channel as part of a project being conducted by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, or TCEQ and its partner at the University of Houston to field test a new type of remote sensing technology intended to identify sources of benzene emissions.

The helicopter was equipped with specialized remote sensing technology known as Differential Absorption Light Detection and Ranging, or DIAL. The TCEQ used another form of DIAL technology in a past study in the Texas City area of the Gulf Coast in an effort to measure emissions from such industrial sources as liquid storage tanks and flares. The purpose of the project was to field test the capabilities of a smaller, more specialized version of DIAL technology mounted on a helicopter.

The project is part of an ongoing TCEQ effort to identify sources of volatile organic compounds emissions in the Houston Ship Channel area. The DIAL technology used in this project has been adjusted to detect the presence of benzene. The benzene DIAL technology is based on technology that has been successfully used for many years in the oil and gas industry to search for methane leaks from underground pipelines.

While ground based and airborne DIAL systems have been in use for many years, a specialized airborne benzene detection system has never been used in a field setting.

TCEQ Selects ‘09 Texas Environmental Excellence Winners

Ten innovative projects and people across the state that demonstrate positive effects on air, water and land resources were named the winners of the 17th annual Texas Environmental Excellence Awards as presented by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

Among this year’s award recipients are a consumer products manufacturer that recycles 99% of its manufacturing waste; a residential green building program that uses a quality-review process to certify homes and take the guesswork out of a home buyer’s decision; a soil-testing campaign in the Rio Grande Valley that has reduced the use of nitrogen by more than 2 million lbs and cut phosphorus use by 3 million lbs; and a lifelong cotton farmer who has breathed new life into a community by working to establish the largest wind farm in the world in the small town of Roscoe.

Recommended by a Blue Ribbon Committee of environmental experts from public and private industry, the TEEA awards honor individuals, businesses, and organizations that have created successful programs that conserve natural resources, reduce waste, and prevent pollution.

Created by the Texas Legislature in 1993, the awards program reflects the goals of the TCEQ: to protect Texas human and natural resources and ensure clean air, clean water, and the safe management of waste.

Among the 2009 Texas Environmental Excellence Award winners are: the Texas Department of Transportation in the government category; Energy Transfer Technologies of Dallas in the innovative technology category; Texas AgriLife Extension Service of College Station/Rio Grande Valley in the agriculture category; The Institute of Environmental and Human Health, Texas Tech University in Lubbock in the education category; the Kimberly-Clark Corp. of Paris in the large/non-technical category; Cliff Etheredge of Roscoe in the individual category; Build San Antonio Green of San Antonio in the civic/nonprofit category; Mars Snackfood LLC US of Waco in the large business/technical category; Science Rock U—Wetlands Youth Brigade of Whiteface in the education category; and Boerne Independent School District in the water conversation category.