Harper General Contractors brought its ingenuity and creativity to bear in the $28.4-million effort to modernize the nearly 100-year-old RB Simms Water Treatment Facility in Chesnee, S.C.

Crews constructed a raw water feed system consisting of a new 32-million-gallon-per-day ozone generation and pretreatment facility. A 64-mgd raw water intake with passive screening from Lake Bowen was built, with 1,500 linear ft of 64-in. raw water main. The mix of rehabilitation and new construction is taking Spartanburg Water into the next century with a dependable source of drinking water built with future upgrades in mind.

The close proximity of a municipal reservoir and dam meant working carefully to avoid any disturbance to those facilities and eliminating a pipe path through solid granite due to risks blasting presented to the reservoir and dam.

Harper’s solution was to contract a tunnel-boring machine to drill horizontally through 250 ft of granite, which required a 40-ft by 26-ft shaft to prepare the grinding machine. Several weeks of around-the-clock boring were required to keep on schedule.

The team performed extensive imaging and layout exercises to understand impacts to existing utilities, relying on LiDAR imaging, total station robotics and traditional sample boring. The resulting 3D model allowed crews to quickly identify conflicts in both utilities and existing underground piping and to revise drawings.