Melinda Silva on Planning a Regional Water System Through Urban Areas
Planning a regional surface water system through a dense, rapidly developing urban area required extraordinary coordination across environmental permitting, engineering, and infrastructure design. Melinda Silva explains how the project team navigated those challenges and applied lessons learned throughout the process.
Transcript
Transcript edited for clarity and readability.
Well, there were a lot of challenges.
One of them was permitting because we were trying to move forward with getting our environmental permits in place, but we were still in preliminary engineering, so we didn’t have exact alignments.
We had to come up with a way to work in parallel. We decided to pursue our environmental permitting using corridors, hoping we would be able to maintain our alignments inside those corridors.
Development in this region has been fast and furious since we’ve been working on this project.
Trying to site the location of water lines across 55 miles—much of it very developed and very dense—and routing water lines through populated urban areas were the two biggest challenges.
Once you determined where the water line was going to be, the actual design of those projects was, in a lot of ways, easier.
Over time, as we’ve gotten used to the environmental permitting process, we can work our way through it much more easily now that we’ve had a lot of lessons learned along the way
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