Contracting Engineers, Inc.

Jamboree Business Center, Irvine, California was a fast track project comprising of three office buildings each having three stories. CEI was the wet underground subcontractor and our scope of work was to begin immediately after the rough grading. We would normally construct the sewer first because the sewer is usually the deepest, then the storm drain and finally the water. However, we were unable to begin the work as planned because the civil engineer had used obsolete surveying data that affected the sewer and storm drain design. The building construction commenced in spite of the delay to redesign the work we were to perform in advance of the building and other construction.

CEI immediately responded by performing work not affected out of sequence as the redesign was performed. The general contractor and the client agreed to pay overtime premiums to get our work back on schedule. CEI accelerated the work by putting multiple crews to work on multiple portions of the work simultaneously as the design was finished and approved by the various public agencies were made available. In the end CEI delivered its scope of work without delaying the project.

The sewer redesign was released first and constructed quickly. The storm drain was affected the most by the redesign and took the longest to finish and be approved. CEI constructed storm drain that engineer said would not be changed and moved directly to construct the domestic and fire water systems. Adjustments to the already shallow storm drains made all the underground wet utilities closer to one another and in some cases the water lines conflicted with the storm drains. To mitigate conflicts with the adjusted storm drain pipes water under crossings were constructed.

  
  
  

The buildings have palms around the building perimeter every 15 feet requiring a sub drainage system adjacent the building to drain water away from the footings, each palm required a drain and each palm light required a drain as well. As you can see there was a lot of labor associated with this work all of which had to be accelerated to be completed in advance of the building foundation and framing.

  
  

Finally, off-site domestic and reclaimed water needed to be brought into the site. The traffic conditions in the adjacent streets are very heavy and often congested. To accommodate the traffic the connections in Jamboree were performed at night and the work in Michelle was performed under severely restricted working hours.

In spite of all the adverse conditions CEI was able to perform its work without delaying the progress of the building construction and helped the general contractor to deliver their contract without delaying the client’s occupancy date.