Ponca City project wins top engineering award

A Ponca City engineering project took top honors last week at the Oklahoma Chapter of American Council of Engineering Companies.

The project was a rehabilitation of an 80-year-old sanitary sewer line that runs through the Phillips 66 refinery.

City Manager Craig Stephenson said the project won the Grand Conceptor Award, which is the No. 1 project of the year in Oklahoma.

The project was engineered by Cabbiness Engineering of Norman.

The line was plagued by frequent backups, multiple broken and missing pipe segments, and large amounts of groundwater inflow and infiltration. The major obstacle to fixing the situation was the fact that it ran through the heart of the Phillips 66 refinery, which was operating at full capacity 24 hours a day, Stephenson said.

Nearly 6,700 linear feet of sanitary sewer main was evaluated and many design alternatives and construction methods were considered. Cabbiness chose an innovative trenchless rehabilitation approach which combined pipe bursting and a cured-in-place approach.

The project had to adhere to refinery safety requirements, as well as coordinating field personnel to fit around the refinery’s schedule. Cabbiness also had to coordinate with the BNSF Railway engineeers on the segment beneath the railroad inside the refinery property.

The project was submitted for consideration on the national level, Stephenson said.

The $1.668 million project was completed within budget and within the four-month construction schedule.