Insider Insights: MWL Interview Details Intricacies of Plant Upgrade
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Municipal Water Leader Magazine spotlights NWP’s role in Middlesex Water Company’s $70M Plant Upgrade
According to Ron Payne, senior project manager at our Saginaw, Texas facility, most of our projects are “high footage and low fabrication,” with fabrication making up just 10-20% of the project. For the Middlesex Water Company (MWC) treatment plant upgrade project in Edison, New Jersey, that number was closer to 45%. How can a company known for “long and large” pipe deliver exacting precision at a smaller scale? With agile engineering, impeccably skilled fabrication, and a resourceful mind for overcoming challenges. In an interview with Municipal Water Leader Magazine, Ron Payne and MWC director of project delivery, Michael J. Barnes, discuss this complex project’s intricacies, providing insights on what it took to execute it successfully.
In the article, Ron details our scope in this project, which included providing spiralweld steel pipe and fittings in various sizes, linings, and coating options–and the crucial role precision design, creative thinking, and flexible redesign played in making it a success. At the crux of this project was the relocation and re-tie in of an existing 72-inch RCP pipeline with connections. With just eight hours of shutdown time allotted for installation, there was no room for error. According to Ron, the connections presented a unique design challenge:
“At one end, our 60‑inch line connected to a reinforced concrete pipe, which is a whole different animal. Our 72‑inch diameter for that size pipe is 84 inches in diameter in their world, so we had to figure out how to connect two sections of pipe whose diameters differed by 12 inches…We had to build a 90‑degree elbow that went from 60 inches on one side of the elbow up to 84 inches in diameter on the other and hit those two points exactly.”
Engineering our product to the exact specifications was crucial to this project’s successful execution under extreme time restraints. For more details on how the project came together, from design to installation, read the full interview here.