Community center and lower site project

Update 12/29/2000

 

    The Community Center and Lower Site Portion of the Phase I Project are well underway. The last month has been spent doing mostly site work. The French drain system I updated you on earlier is in place and working extremely well. I’m not sure that the Council received this report. I sent it through the Executive Office on 11/29/2000. If you didn’t receive a copy of this report, please let me know and I will make another one for you. This reports details the installation of the French drain system around the Community Center complete with photos.

    Once the French drain was installed, the area quickly dried up, allowing Austin to proceed with the next phase of work. Installation of the mud slab and the footers for the north side of the Community Center was completed. The mud slab is a fairly wide slab pour that is used to create a nice flat surface on top of the shale for the buildings footers. Since the mud slab and footer on the north side have to support a fairly substantial retaining wall, they are poured both wide and thick. The photos below illustrate what they look like.

Figure 1- forming for the mud slabFigure 2- Footer on top of mud slab with rebar being formed for retaining wall columns


       
                                                        
                                                                                                   

    After the mudslab and footer were poured, XL Concrete began forming for the retaining walls. The rebar for the columns is put in place and then the rest of the forms are constructed. This retaining wall will stabilize the area on the north side between Peaceful Spirit and the Community Center. This is required because we have a considerable amount of fill on the north side of the Community Center building. The resulting pressure from all of the fill material would be more than a normal wall structure could handle.

Figure 3- Forming the retaining wallFigure 4- Pouring the first half of the retaining wall

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                       
                                                                                                                            

    Other work that is currently underway at the Community Center is the underslab plumbing and the aeration system for under the gym floor. The aeration system consists of a series of PVC standpipes that are connected to perforated drainpipe that runs the length of the gym floor. While the system will pick up any water that happens to penetrate under the gym floor slab, the primary purpose is to provide aeration to eliminate any possible moisture build-up that could potentially cause problems for the wood gym floor. The underslab plumbing is primarily for drains, toilets, boiler room drains, etc. 

Figure 5 - Installing the gym floor aeration system              Figure 6 - Beginning the under-slab plumbing    

                                
                                                                                                                                   

 

Lower Site Work

    Firehawk has completed a considerable amount of the initial lower site work such as flattening, placing fill material, and working on the new alignment for Ute Road. A portion of the new Ute Road work that has been particularly interesting is the installation of an RCP (Rolled Concrete Pipe) that will be used to handle the water from an old BIA irrigation ditch on the Lower Site. While I’m told that the ditch hasn’t been used for irrigation purposes in quite sometime, it does flow a fairly good amount of water. Most of the water in the ditch comes from ground water drainage off the plateau to the west I suspect. I’m not sure how much is actually coming from the Pine River. Construction of the RCP and concrete headwalls has been anything but average. The area presented quite a few problems for the construction crew as illustrated in the photos below.  

                                                                         Figure 8 - One problem was to divert the water so the area would dry up enough for bedding material to be installedFigure 7 - Removing material for the RCP placement

 

 

 

 

 

 

                               

                                                                          Figure 10 - Preparing the footers for the RCP
Figure 9 - Bedding for the RCP

                                                                       

                                                                                                                                   Figure 12 - Completed headwall and backfill
Figure 11 - RCP headwall form

                                                                    

                                                  

    Now that the headwall and RCP have been placed, backfill will be installed over the system and built up to where the new Ute Road can be completed to intersect with County Road #517. The grade coming off the top of the hill and down to the lower site will be at 8%. To put this in perspective, an 8% grade means that the road will drop 8 feet in elevation vertically for every 100 feet it travels horizontally. 8% is the maximum grade allowable under both State and Federal regulations. To flatten this grade anymore than the 8% we would have had to use a considerable additional amount of fill material which would have driven the costs up considerably. There will be a flat spot on the top of the hill where it meets the County Road that will allow four cars to be lined up while waiting for traffic to clear before it slopes off to the 8% hill. Guardrail will be installed along both sides of the road coming down off the hill to prevent cars from sliding off into the wetlands.  

                                                                       From this.......To this........

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                          

    The lower site will undergo a tremendous face change over the next several months. The photos above provide a hint to how much that will be. When the project is complete the transformation should be something to behold. I believe it will be something that the Tribe will like very much.

    The next month we will see a lot more concrete work being done at the Community Center. I know that there are several people who are very skeptical of pouring concrete in the winter months. There is always that fear that the cold weather will compromise the concrete. As long as the proper precautions are being taken as far as providing heat blankets to allow the concrete to cure properly there should be no problem. In addition, Basin Engineering, the geotechnical company who has been performing all of the soils tests, also monitors the concrete pours. Cylinders are filled with the concrete being poured. Then at specific intervals, the concrete in the cylinders is broken to verify its p.s.i. strength (pounds per square inch). These breaks are usually done at 7, 14, and 21 days. We receive the results of these breaks and they become a part of our permanent construction file.

 

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