When Daniel O’Connell’s Sons won the construction contract in 2018 for the $122-million York Street Pump Station and Connecticut River Crossing project in Springfield, Mass., the owner’s designer, Kleinfelder, suggested pipe jacking to launch three new wastewater conveyance pipelines at the pump station that would run under a railroad and flood wall before crossing the river and passing through a levee to the Springfield Water & Sewer Commission treatment facility in Agawam, Mass. That would involve installing a pipe jacket on each side of an active Amtrak commuter rail corridor and jacking two 36-in.-dia force main pipelines and one 72-in.-dia siphon pipe under the railroad and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers flood wall before launching them from a dry cofferdam receiving pit near the east riverbank, recalls Jeff Weinman, project executive for O’Connell’s Sons, the project’s Holyoke, Mass.-based general contractor.
Once into permitting, however, the plan dissolved because it would require a receiving pit on the river from a barge, which was not possible without a lengthy and costly process. “Access would be difficult installing a receiving pit from a barge since water levels have been so low,” Weinman says. The pipe-jacking option would also require two access points with a launch shaft in the same position as the tunneling access shaft and a receiving shaft in the river, he says.