Located in Shawnee Park, part of Louisville’s Olmsted Park System listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the project consisted of the design and construction of a large “capture and release” system to temporarily store CSO’s during wet weather events and gradually release them back to the collection system for treatment when capacity is available. New facilities included a 20 million gallon storage basin; associated washdown systems; a 30 million gallon per day effluent pump station; CSO diversion structures; and associated conveyance piping.
Preservation of Olmstedian design features in Shawnee Park – in particular the pastoral, undulating surface of the Great Lawn – made it vital that the project team design and construct a facility virtually invisible to the public. To achieve this goal, the basin was constructed below the surface of the Great Lawn with a walk-out operational access point concealed by park topography.
Through the progressive design-build delivery process, the project provided triple bottom line benefits (social, economic, and environmental) for the community. At project kickoff, a multidisciplinary team of MSD (owner), Brown and Caldwell (owner’s advisor), Ulliman Schutte Construction (design-builder), and Burgess & Niple (engineer) “developed an outreach process for stakeholders to keep them involved,” said MSD’s Executive Director Tony Parrott.