Tibbetts Award

The City of Toledo is working through a 10-year, $500-million Ohio EPA-approved Plan of Capital Improvements at their Collins Park Water Treatment Plant. The largest and most difficult project in the plan, the Basin 7 & Basin 8 project, was awarded to Mosser Construction and is the most significant expansion of the Plant since 1956. Each basin provides 20 million gallons of drinking water per day through flocculation, sedimentation and recarbonation basins fitted with dual media filters, massive piping runs, masonry structures, and chemical feed facilities. Although built as one integrated project, the basins were sold and administered as two separate contracts, drawings and specifications. Project challenges included relocating multiple plant utility lines which bisected the site; a virtually inaccessible site hampered by road construction projects in one direction and a major train switching station on the other; extremely wet early spring site conditions requiring all excavated dirt to be moved off-site and later returned; a six-month soil consolidation period leading Mosser to secure an engineering firm to design a deep-foundation solution to mitigate schedule compression; an owner-directed change to the structural steel corrosion protection system causing distortion in the beam members, requiring flange extensions for masonry support and major masonry alignment challenges to match existing masonry coursings amid window openings and headers; a subsequent and adjacent project start which eliminated a significant section of Mosser’s laydown and staging area; and more. Mosser’s innovative naming/identification scheme and computer model tracked every pour in the 19,918 cubic yards of concrete needed for the basins, slab walls and decks in Basins 7 and 8. The project included $10,000 per day liquidated damage requirements but Mosser “finished strong” by beating both the EPA-mandated deadline – and Ohio’s state-wide COVID19 shutdown – by more than two weeks.