Transportation, Environmental, and Project News

TRANSPORTATION

Parsons Brinckerhoff, New York, was awarded a contract to provide on-call general engineering and construction management services to Caltrain, the public transit system linking San Francisco and San Jose, Calif.

Responsibilities include multi-disciplinary planning, engineering, design, and architectural services.

Mactec, Inc., Alpharetta, Ga., was awarded a $757,567 contract from the Georgia Department of Transportation to develop construction plans and specifications for the State Route 10 Loop and Peter Street/Olympic Drive interchange project in Athens, Ga.

Estimated construction costs are $10.3 million and the project is slated for construction in Fiscal Year 2008.

Portland, Ore.-based Otak Inc. was awarded three retainer contracts with the city of Beaverton, Ore., for engineering services for transportation improvements; technical support services, including landscape architecture and survey work; and utility infrastructure improvements, primarily hydrologic and hydraulic modeling. The firm will be eligible to be sole sourced for projects valued at $250,000 and less; and be part of a competitive short-list process for projects between $250,000 and $350,000.

The New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority selected Philadelphia-based Urban Engineers to provide construction management services for a $140-million project that focuses on rail and roadway enhancements to improve access to the Meadowlands Sports Complex, which includes Giants Stadium, the Meadowlands Racetrack, and the Continental Airlines Arena.

ENVIRONMENTAL

Arcadis, with U.S. headquarters in Denver, was selected by the Port of Houston Authority to provide engineering and construction services to complete the $1.8-billion Bayport wetland mitigation project. The project will mitigate about 70 acres for wetlands and coastal prairie impacted during construction of the Bayport Terminal Complex. With a mitigation ratio of 3.4:1, wetlands will be constructed in an area adjacent to the Armand Bayou Nature Center in Pasadena, Texas, under a permanent conservation easement.

WATER

Horner & Shifrin, Inc. , St. Louis, was selected to design a new chlorination system for the city of Columbia, Ill. The system will be used to boost the chlorine residual in water received from the city’s southern connection to the Illinois American Water Company. System components include a storage tank, two chemical feed pumps, and a main connector.

The California Department of Water Resources selected San Francisco-based URS Corporation to perform engineering studies, including hydraulic modeling, feasibility designs, and decision analysis, for a project to enlarge the East Branch of the California Aqueduct. The East Branch canal is a 100-milelong segment of the aqueduct that runs through the Mojave Desert in Southern California. The project will increase its capacity from 2,000 cubic feet per second (cfs) to 2,880 cfs, which also requires increasing the capacity of the pumping and power plants and raising many bridges over the canal.