The work under this lump sum contract comprised of the retrofit to the Britannia Water Purification Plant Settling Basin 4 & 5 Plate Settlers for the City of Ottawa. This project consisted of two construction phases in an operating water purification plant and required careful sequencing and coordination with the City of Ottawa operations staff to maintain adequate production of drinking water throughout construction. The work in both phases was identical but very complex, whereas ASCO had to demolish the existing plate settlers located in deep, large concrete basin and to replace them with state of the art equipment. To that end, many plant shutdown had to be coordinated with the City and ASCO had to build temporary working platform inside of each basin capable of supporting heavy demolition machinery as well as workers and demolition debris. Entry and exit from the plant were limited due to operational constraints. As such, debris removal and handling of old and new equipment was a challenge. Temporary hoarding, platform and stairs were required.

The new plate settlers system was delivered to the project site fully assembled by the supplier’s factory. Due to operational constraints and limited size of entry points, ASCO was required to manually disassemble the new plate settler system outside and manually bring the parts into the basin building and subsequently reassemble all the parts to its factory assembly state.

Phase 1 of this Project was schedule to start on April 1, 2019 and to be substantially completed by October 31, 2019. At the outset, the work was delayed due to the 2019 spring floods which prevented ASCO from starting work on the critical patch of this project until mid-May 2019. However, ASCO did manage to get Phase one of this project completed on November 14, 2019, well within the allotted schedule duration, despite the delays out of its control.