WASHINGTON, D.C. — Burgess & Niple Inc. of Louisville has earned a National Recognition Award for exemplary engineering achievement in the American Council of Engineering Companies’ 53rd annual Engineering Excellence Awards for designing the Southwestern Parkway Combined Sewer Overflow Basin in Louisville.
The Southwestern Parkway CSO is a major component of the Metropolitan Sewer District’s efforts to control potentially harmful overflow discharges of combined storm and sanitary sewers into the area’s water supply following heavy rain events. Concealed beneath the Great Lawn in Louisville’s historic Shawnee park, the system includes a 20 million-gallon concrete storage tank and associated washdown systems, odor control provisions, and a 30-million-gallon-per-day pump station.
The park’s proximity to the CSOs and an existing MSD flood pump station made it an ideal location for the facilities. Still, the project team was challenged to preserve design principles set down by noted landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead, particularly the Great Lawn’s pastoral, undulating surface. The only evidence of the system’s existence is an operations building that itself is discretely concealed by the park’s topography.
Other participants include Leonard Engineering (structural), Jacobi Toombs & Lanz (civil), Magna (mechanical, electrical, and plumbing), and Engineered Solutions (planning and integration), all of Louisville; American Engineers of Glasgow, Ky. (geotechnical); and DLZ of Lexington, Ky (structural).
The project is eligible for additional honors as part of a record 203 entries this year representing engineering excellence from throughout the nation and the world. Judging for the awards program—known industry-wide as the “Academy Awards of the engineering industry”– took place in February and was conducted by a national 35-member panel of built environment leaders, along with experts from government, the media and academia. Award criteria focused on uniqueness and originality, technical innovation, social and economic value, and generating excitement for the engineering profession.
Recognition of all award winners including top winners—20 Honor Awards, 16 Grand Awards and the prestigious “Grand Conceptor Award” for the year’s most outstanding overall engineering achievement—will take place at the annual EEA Dinner and Gala, a black-tie event to be held Tuesday, April 28, 2020, at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, D.C.
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