As I was looking for some pictures I came across some oddball pictures, of sewer grates I took as we were doing some very last minute walking around the Gold Souk area in Dubai.
Taking taxis, the amazing train system, and walking around Dubai you can’t really stop looking at all of the buildings that have been built over the last few years. But me with my Civil Engineering background, I like to see how some of the infrastructure works. I started to look all over the place for things to take pictures of. I think it was just way too hot to really get the cameras out and take photos like I thought I would. While walking in the harsh desert heat we were pretty much looking for the next chilly building to escape the sun. Here are a couple pictures of sewer grates. Nothing special but not something you probably see posted on the internet.
I wonder when I will find the crazy drainage stuff I took pictures of while in South East Asia?
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As the Civil Engineering industry evolves, the Civil Engineer must evolve with the code and regulation changes.
We went to a new job site in Redondo Beach to discuss the lot for two new houses that will overlook the ocean. While talking to the developer we went over a few different stormwater mitigation measures that are starting to pop up in Los Angeles County. The South Bay beach cities are a bit different than Los Angeles City standards, but the general idea is the same. Infiltrate and clean stormwater when possible. Now that the new Los Angeles City codes (LID/SUSMP) are starting to trickle down into other cities I went to Redondo Beach Building and Safety to clarify what they would need for a grading plan or drainage plan.
After speaking with a Redondo Beach City Engineering, the Civil Engineering involved for handling stormwater depends on where the site is located. Turns out our site falls where we don’t need to do any stormwater cleaning or infiltration. That was great news. But what about another project that will be starting up in a month or so that is a commercial complex? I was given the new standards and these new standards basically follow the new Los Angeles City LID requirements. We must infiltrate when possible. If infiltration is not feasible, then there are some other methods to contain a certain volume of stormwater on site.
This new method of handling stormwater is not exactly new. But the cities in Los Angeles are starting to adopt the new measures. Even though this can make designing a site a little more tricky, this is good for the environment to help sustain Southern California just a little bit longer.
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Our latest Civil Engineering project in Los Angeles is on Lankershim Blvd.
The latest project involving Civil Engineering will be working on grading plans in Los Angeles for the developer, Chandler Partners. The project is called Lankershim NoHo Mixed Use, and is more specifically in North Hollywood in the NoHo Arts District 4 blocks away from the MTA Redline Subway Station. The first part of the project will be demolishing multiple buildings sitting between Fair Ave., Otsego St., and Lankershim Blvd. in Los Angeles. From there a new 5 story complex will be built. The whole property ties into those 3 streets which makes placement of the building more critical than normal. There will also be a street widening taking place.
This will be our first project in Los Angeles that uses the new LID requirements on something that is not small residential. To meet the new more strict stormwater guidelines, we will propose planter boxes to collect the stormwater. The new LID requirements want us to take an area of the roof and to build roughly 5.5% of that roof area as planter boxes in the ground. The water will collect into these planter boxes which act like a pool. The water is able to infiltrate the soil and stay on site as much as possible. If the storm is too big, these planter boxes will overflow into a pipe that will lead to the street through the curb face. The difference between a larger project in Los Angeles compared to the smaller residential is that the area of planter boxes needed is greater. This has also been changed from the previous SUSMP requirement where the area required was less. More stormwater being held on site helps with cutting down on water going into the storm drain system. This also allows more stormwater to be clarified through the planter boxes and any water eventually reaching the storm drain system is much cleaner.
Civil Engineers do not have too much to work with regarding Green Codes and LEED. But underneath almost every new project in Los Angeles Civil Engineers are quietly and almost invisibly making storm water much more clean. Most people do not know that the storm drain system leads directly to the ocean unfiltered. That is why there are blue stamps on storm drain catch basins and inlets saying do not dump dirty water into the storm drain. In the end this clean stormwater reaches the ocean and is much better for the community as our ocean water and beaches can be slightly less contaminated. Civil Engineer’s greening of new construction may not be pretty, but civil engineering is responsible for making our future a little bit brighter.
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The Regent Square project in Inglewood has been through a couple revisions since we first started working on the Apartment complex.
I decided to stop by the site today to get some pictures of the site’s progress. The site has been a demolished building for some time. Seeing that building is up and the contractors are starting the fine grading is great to see. We had some calls recently to double check the specs of the infiltration system we designed. One reason I really like working with Chandler Partners is that everyone works together, especially asking questions to check everyones’ work.
The site was first rough graded using our excavation plan. The excavation was able to be done without shoring. We used a 1:1 cut slope to dig out the underground parking. In some places we used a maximum 5′ vertical cut as the building was pretty close to property boundaries and buildings. After the site was rough graded to the excavation plan the building went up.
Currently the surrounding dirt facing the property lines is rough graded, as the contractor is beginning to install the infiltration system. The infiltration system consists of stormwater running over grass, then going to a series of catch basins and then flowing into a 36″ Perforated PVC pipe that can infiltrate into the ground. If the 36″ Perforated PVC pipe fills up then there is an overflow built in that will gravity flow the water into the street. One of the city requirements was to direct as much stormwater into Florence, as Regent Street was already flooding. We decided to bring all of the roof water into this same system to try to manage as much water onto Florence as possible. Smaller storms will contain almost the entire storm on site.
Once the infiltration system is in place the contractors can finish up with the fine grading and new driveway entrances. This project is another fine piece of Civil Engineering work to better the community.
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I was in Irvine and decided to drive over to one of our job sites in Orange County. I was surprised to see this grading project, the Ferrari and Maserati of Newport Beach service center open for business.
What a pleasant surprise to see the building completed, parking lot regraded, and all the drainage devices in place. But really I was like a kid in the candy shop when I spotted the cars parked inside. This project has been one of my most favorite projects I have worked on in my career, as I went into engineering purely based on looking at the Acura NSX while in school. As I started college at UC Irvine, I would always see Ferraris and Lamborghinis driving around the campus area. From that point on I have been a fan of Formula1, racing, and cars in general. This project was something special, almost bringing a tear to my eye. The Architect was great to work with and he also designs the interior spaces for a lot of the exotic car shops in Southern California. Go figure that myself, my partner and he all went to High School together. I think most people can appreciate fine Italian Exotic cars, and I know all of us were excited to work together on this site.
So what did we do on this project? We had the chance to regrade the parking lot. But not just any regrade, we needed to keep as much of the existing as possible to make this site cost efficient; a typical requirement on every Civil Engineering project that we take on. I also try to design based on low cars driving around and this would be my chance where this would make even more sense than usual. We kept the drainage pattern nearly the same. Though we did have to adjust portions to make the ADA walkways and ADA parking stalls to have the maximum 2% in all directions. That was very difficult to work out between the front door to the ADA walkway going to the sidewalk. Once the walkway worked with the parking stalls we added a new curb and gutter to the side of the driveway fronting the street. That curb and gutter would lead to a catch basin that would flow about half of the site through pipes outletting into the street’s storm drain system.
On the front of the property we removed some of the existing swales to keep the ADA paths as smooth as possible. I would have preferred to completely remove all of the swales in the way of parking cars, but we were able to minimize the brutal existing drainage layout. Brutal as in driving a cushy car over the existing swales would make the car hop up and down. Now its possible to get into a parking spot without going over one of those swales. The other driveway entrance was regraded to smooth everything out. We decided to use the existing downspouts and have them outlet directly onto the driveways. No need to have some complicated system to drain under the parking lot, like we would design for an area with purely pedestrian traffic.
Onto the back of the property a ramp was created as one of the existing loading docks would not be used. There would also be a proposed wash off area that needed to separate the stormwater from the dirty water. This can sometimes be tricky as stormwater is not allowed to enter the sewer system, and dirty water isn’t allowed to enter the storm drain system. Not to mention that this loading dock area had some really crazy grades to make a truck able to back in. So we tied into the flattest parts of the back driveway and regraded to flatten the pad out. Another issue that popped up was an existing pump that took out all of the stormwater out of the low points. This grate on top of the pump became our tie in elevation. After tying everything together we needed a way to separate the areas of the water. So we created a minimal swale between the parking and wash area. The end result was executed perfectly. I got a chance to see the swale in action. The wash area goes into a trench drain, then into a clarifier that cleans out the junk as much as possible and then goes into the sewer system.
After seeing the completed project I am very happy to see everything built to our design. I got to quickly walk through the building and know I had the biggest smile on my face during this unexpected site visit. Thank you to the service manager for letting me walk through the building instead of around to take pictures. The inside is spotless.
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Permeable paving is one of the infiltration standards that Los Angeles and other surrounding cities prefer to use on grading and drainage projects.
We get asked quite a bit what the infiltration standard is and what permeable pavers look like. Most know that permeable pavers are something like grass-crete with blocks of concrete with space in between the blocks, generally filled with grass, used to drain stormwater. The attached picture shows the current Los Angeles City standard section for permeable pavers, which is one of the options a small scale residential project can implement to meet the LID requirements.
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After reminiscing about my college years and some recent projects, I was driving and noticed a bridge along with the grading to make that bridge work.
Being a Civil Engineer and noticing items on our landscape that are probably just taken for granted, I thought about how much work goes into grading something like a freeway through a mountainous area. The terrain can sometimes be overlooked because most freeways have sound walls that block what you can see over. Or other freeways like the 210 going between Los Angeles and Vegas are built below the surrounding land.
Grading a large subdivision was a great way to jump into understanding how to read topography. Seeing my first bridge on a plan was even better. Civil Engineers learn a lot of different topics while in school and on the job. We need to understand how to read a soils report, how water flow works, how a structure works, and we were given the tools to learn how to solve most any type of problem thrown our way. A Civil Engineer rarely gets to see even a fraction of what they have learned while on the job. I myself started at a company that was transitioning from being a full service Civil Engineering company who would eventually specialize in the Surveying field. This was my first taste of grading and I wanted more.
Move forward to the next company where I worked on large scale subdivisions. Being thrown into a large subdivision with everything that ties together is not for the faint of heart. Sure you could work on your own little piece of the puzzle. But that’s not challenging. I wanted to dip right into the project and try my best to get a full understanding of what I was doing. Grading after grading after grading and I was slowly learning how each little piece worked. My eyes were finally opened as I got to attempt my first design that involved a bridge. Maybe to some this is easier than I make it sound, but I had to wrap my head around something completely new. Grading under an object to make that object still work and show what is above and below that object. After I spent some time designing on a piece of mylar over a piece of bond paper, I was ready to put that design to the computer.
After a few times plotting samples to make the plan legible, I was happy. The grading worked, the bridge worked, the roadway worked, drainage worked, site distance easements worked, everything worked. After staring out of the window of the car looking at the sides of the freeway we were driving on, I couldn’t stop thinking about who designed this? What was going through their mind? And most of all, did they get the new guy who is nice and green or did they use an old school seasoned Civil Engineer to design the grading along this particular portion of the freeway.
Either way there is a lot more to what we see in our every day lives as we do our thing. Whether that massive bridge being demolished and built over the 405 on the Sepulveda Pass or that simple little onramp that we all use to get to work in the morning. Not to mention the complex math that is involved in making that traffic light work on that little onramp that ties to the flow of traffic on the freeway. We aren’t using rotating drums for traffic systems anymore. Designing an onramp really isn’t that simple.
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On projects with large cut and fill earthwork numbers we need to build a database model to get the proper amount of dirt being moved around.
On a typical grading plan there is always some amount of dirt to move around. On lots that are more flat, the dirt being pushed around isn’t too significant except for bonding purposes. But when we work on a hillside grading plan the amount of dirt being pushed can be quite significant. Sometimes a project will call for designing and drawing up excavation plans. I decided to make a quick render of just the excavation portion for one of the projects we worked on in Beverly Hills. Normally I would tie the original topography that a surveyor shot, but we didn’t get an elevated file. So I only chose to elevate the original survey around the proposed area for earthwork purposes.
This particular excavation plan called for removing and recompacting 5′ of dirt under the entire house, including basement, and the garage based on the soils engineer report to make the land better. To get this to work we used a 1:1 cut slope and on deeper cuts, made a vertical cut. The trick to this was getting this cut to work against the Northerly property line which sits up against the neighbors property line. We can’t cross the line, so a lot of attention to detail had to be paid to making this cut work against the entire property line. We also needed a path for a truck to drive down to do the excavation. Notice the driveway has been dug out at 20% maximum slope for vehicle access.
After the slopes have been made with an outline of the building we can than tie everything together by daylighting to the existing survey data. That is the extent of the model as we do not need anything else to run the numbers. With the existing database of contour data made, we now have the proposed database of contour data created, and we can now get the cut and fill numbers. I mentioned in a previous post, Contact Case 3D Flyby, that I wanted to show what a grading plan looks like in 3D, as I know certain clients want to know what the plan view of a grading plan looks like in real life.
I took the database file and rendered with a polymesh and created a really simple flyby. Eventually, when there is more free time, I will add more detail to the drawing and have a rendering similar to what an Architect does for their conceptual plans. This would include having the dirt look like real dirt. Grass look like real grass. Place a generic building on top of the lot. And make the scene look more like real life.
The big problem I see with doing something like this, is just how resource intensive rendering something simple is. I am sitting here looking at the renderer with 3 hours to go and making my machine slow as molasses. The computer I am running this on is no slouch either. If an Intel quad core processor overclocked to 4ghz with a Radeon 7950 and SSD drive is biting the dust, as I can’t really do anything else, except gently browse the web, it may be time to buy a separate PC for purely rendering. That is if we get enough clients who want something like this. As I try to type this, I am thinking of how big the data farms are to render a clip from a high definition cartoon such as Finding Nemo?
The end result of draping images over the proposed topography would be a beautiful model to put on a projector for a planning commission to take a look at during a hearing. We have one such project where the client flew an Architect from Japan to design their 4th structure and ended up building a physical model out of foam board. I would rather they built their computer model and combined our grading model to make something that is viewable just like real life, where we can make changes on the fly according to what the client wants.
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I decided to make a simple 3D animation of the contact case model that I made back in 1997.
I mention to clients that when we do earthwork takeoffs that we can render the grading plans into something that can be looked at outside of the typical engineer grading plan views. Here is an example of what I am talking about. A rendering for earthwork would not show the true building, unless we were given a 3D model of the building. But we can make the land look pretty similar to what the contours would look like in real life. To model with texture mapping is too time intensive for these purposes, as a photo realistic fly through is not too important since the Architect already has rendered plans. Anyone who has a hillside grading project may like seeing what their project will look like, even without all of the fancy textures.
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We had the project that needed to collect most of the water onsite in Palos Verdes Estates to prevent the erosion of the cliff leading to the ocean.
Lately we have been specing out pumps more frequently with the changes involved in drainage from city to city. This job site was something else. It turns out that the storm drain that leads directly to the ocean was installed at the top of the street with a straight shot down to the water. Looking at the original storm drain plans showed a pipe that would be under more than 200 feet of earth at the bottom of the outlet. The trick to this project was could we find the existing pipe and drain directly into the pipe. After much consideration we realized trying to locate the pipe where we could connect might mean excavating more than 30 feet of dirt. The next problem was the horizontal control of the pipe wasn’t clear according to property line and easements on the site we were working on.
So out came the idea of using a pump to drain the Palos Verdes single family residence to the street which would then collect into the street catch basin and go out into the ocean. After checking our calculations many times we came up with the pump sizing along with the pump’s pit dimensions. The next obstacle in the way was having such a deep pit built.
I am proud to say the builder on this job did what Wilson called extreme engineering after we visited the site in the different stages of digging. Not only did Vince Devico of DC construction build something very complicated, but everything was done right. I am still in awe of this particular site because of the difficult conditions to place an 18 foot deep pump system. We didn’t get a chance to be there for the pit installation but I understand everyone on the street came out for the event. Did I mention they were not only dodging known pipes but kept coming across other utilities that were either on or abandoned, and I can’t forget about the tree in the way of the outlet.
Most of our past jobs have been pretty straight forward, but with the new drainage codes in most of the cities we are working in, I foresee much more building that will encounter such obstacles as this project.
Brandon Lee
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