Drainage helps ease city pressures - City of Gainesville

“Because of Hardie® Pipe ... we finished the project earlier than expected." William Benson, Pipe Crew Foreman for City of Gainesville Works Department.


Project Name: NW 35th Ave Stormwater Improvement
Location: NW 35th Ave, City of Gainesville, Florida
Client/Civil Engineer/Civil Contractor: City of Gainesville
Completion Date: May 2006
Hardie® Pipe Used: 1,248ft of Class III and Class IV Hardie® Pipe


Public Sector projects are always under immense pressure to minimize costs and the interruption to their community members. The City of Gainesville looked to Hardie Pipe to help manage these pressures during a recent stormwater reconstruction project.

The design team at the City of Gainesville faced two key challenges:

1. They needed to use good quality materials which would provide the city with a long standing, high performing asset.
2. Their design solution had to work around existing utilities but it still had to keep costs and time to a minimum.

The project design clearly called for reinfored concrete pipe (RCP) to meet FDOT requirements. But the questions was which RCP could also overcome their two key issues?

The answer was clear. Hardie® Pipe.

Hardie® Pipe demonstrated it would not only delivery on the standard RCP performance requirements, but it would also provide some unique benefits to the City of Gainesville:

• 16ft lengths meant the pipe run could be installed significantly quicker.
• The unique strength properties of fiber reinforced concrete meant that Hardie® Pipe could deliver superior RCP strength with a wall not as thick as other RCP's.
• The superior pipe strength meant it could handle the heavy construction loads, even with relatively shallow cover.
• The smaller outside diameters (from reduced wall) meant it was viable to work around existing utilities.
• At approximately half the weight of other RCP materials, Hardie® Pipe could provide greater ease of handling to improve installation efficiencies.

William Benson, Pipe Crew Foreman for City of Gainesville said, "Because of Hardie® Pipes's lighter weight we could use our own machinery for offloading and installing. We didn't have to hire larger earthmoving equipment and we finished the project earlier than expected."

In fact installation efficiencies were also gained from the longer pipe lengths. At approximately twice the length of other RCPs, Hardie® Pipe's 16ft lengths meant the pipe crew reduced their handling by 78 pipes (compared to installations with alternative RCP products).

City of Gainesville

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