Full Issue (17 MB) - Pile Driving Contractors Association

The Harvey Canal Project:
Saving Time, Saving
Money and Saving Lives
For years, more than 200,000 homes and businesses in
Louisiana’s Jefferson Parish have been at risk. Their
only flood protection from a major canal on the Gulf
Intracoastal Water Way has been a short earthen levee or
bulkheads the property owners built themselves.
“It’s caused us nightmares,” says Giuseppe Miserendino,
executive director of the West Jefferson Levee District.
“After this hurricane season, we won’t have to worry about
it.”
That’s because crews are finishing a $250 million steel
and concrete floodwall along the Harvey Canal that’ll rise
19 feet above land – more than twice as tall as the earthen
levee and far more solid. The floodwall will stretch more
than 3 miles, and besides potentially saving lives, it’s also
been an award-winning lesson in saving time and money.
Building a T-wall
Designs for the Harvey Canal project called for a T-wall
(built like an inverted T). A total of about 30,000 yards of
concrete will be set atop 7,800 steel H-piles, some of which
are as long as 140 feet. To install piles that long, contractors
would normally get the pile delivered in two pieces, install
the bottom half, then splice on the top. For this project,
though, that would have been too expensive and taken too
much time.
The crews at Cajun Deep Foundations, a subsidiary of
specialty contractor Cajun Industries, developed a second
option. They asked Nucor-Yamato Steel to roll the piles
at full length. All told, more than 1 million linear feet of
HP14 x 89 piles will be used. About 900 piles still needed to
be spliced, but with a project that required a total of 7,800
piles, Cajun’s idea saved nearly $8 million in splicing costs
alone, says Chris Thompson, a Cajun project manager. And
that doesn’t include the savings from getting the work done
so much quicker.
“That amount,” Thompson says, “far exceeds the $8
million saved from splicing.”
The solution helped the Army Corps of Engineers sus-
• Q4 • 2009
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