2025 Mountain States Best Projects
Award of Merit, Water/Environment and Safety: Boulder 63rd Water Treatment Facility Campus Electrical & High Service Pump Station
Boulder 63rd Water Treatment Facility Campus Electrical & High Service Pump Station
Boulder, Colo.
Award of Merit, Water Environment, and Award of Merit, Safety
Submitted by Weifield Group Contracting
Owner City of Boulder
Lead Design Firm HDR
General Contractor Archer Western Construction
Electrical Contractor Weifield Group Contracting
Repairs and upgrades were made to the treatment plant’s power supply and electrical components and to the high service pump station, the city’s largest potable water pump station. Electrical scope included installing 25,000 ft of medium voltage (MV) cabling and implementing new MV upgrades, including switchgear and transformers. The facility’s existing raw water backup supply was revamped, and HVAC systems and controls were replaced.
Multiple buildings had to remain operational during various shutdowns, and crews installed a permanent temp power transformer mitigating the need for six large generators.
The new switchgear runs the pump station located in the floor below the electric room.
The team developed a plan that involved no conduit and used a cable tray pathway, saving work at no cost to the city.
During a 12-week large-scale outage in early 2023, installation proceeded on new medium voltage power loops in the utility yard and workers began bringing the large high service pump station and equipment inside the buildings online to begin producing water.
With so many outages that needed to be executed without impacting the existing plant, dozens of methods of procedure were implemented for every task and shutdown. Once approved, these procedures would be reviewed again just before task execution.
After 22,432 work hours, crews logged zero lost-time or recordable incidents.
