Following Vermont’s record flash flooding last July 10-11 that killed two people and caused about $682 million in infrastructure damage, Benjamin Heath, civil construction manager at Engineers Construction Inc., received an emergency call from Burlington city officials that a 24-in.-dia sanitary sewer pipe had breached. Wastewater was no longer entering the city treatment plant, and officials had little information about the underwater pipe that had leaked an estimated 3 million gallons of sewage into the Winooski River.
As the city’s on-call service contractor, the Williston, Vt.-based company’s team led by Heath persuaded officials not to pump sewage into a nearby sanitary sewer manhole, which gravity drains into the plant. Seemingly a “great solution, it risked overflowing and backflowing sewage into residents’ basements,” Heath says. The team instead built a temporary pump station on the river’s southern side and then installed a mile-long temporary sanitary sewer pipe to the city’s wastewater treatment plant.