Barnard Construction Co., Inc.

Owner:

outh Florida Water Management District in partnership with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

Scope Of Work

For well over a decade, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) has been working with the South Florida Water Management District to design and construct a series of projects that will restore and protect one of the nation’s treasures. One feature slated to play a large part in this Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP) is the construction of new reservoirs. Since the mid-1930s, Lake Okeechobee, a large, shallow, fresh water lake, has been used in combination with a system of waterways to control flooding in south Florida’s low-lying areas. Over time though, this system has impacted the St. Lucie Estuary, one of America’s most biologically diverse ecosystems, by releasing too much fresh water too quickly, impacting the estuary’s salinity as well as degrading the water quality with domestic, commercial, and agricultural runoff. One solution to this part of the restoration effort has been the design of the C-44 Reservoir and Stormwater Treatment Area (STA) in Martin County, the purpose of which is to capture runoff from the local basin and cleanse it through a settling process before releasing it to the C-44 canal and into the St. Lucie Estuary on Florida’s east coast. The ultimate goal of this specific project is to improve the quality of water through the use of space and time, requiring the water to travel across 3,000 acres of reservoir and through various additional canals and adjacent STA cells.

Barnard first became involved with the C-44 Reservoir in 2006, when we worked with the South Florida Management District to construct the C-44 Test Cells Project. At about the same time, we also constructed the C-43 Test Cells and the EAA Reservoir Test Cells within the broader CERP program. Today, we bring this local, project-specific construction experience to the current C-44 Reservoir Project, Contract No. 2, working with the USACE to build a 3,500-acre reservoir, encircled by a 9.2-mile, 30-foot-high earthen embankment, its interior slope lined with soil cement. Our project will also provide a reservoir discharge tower structure with bridge and gates that will feed the water into a distribution canal that we will construct to tie into the project’s STA ponds. We are again working with HDR, the Design Engineer, on this challenging project.