Client: South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD)
Location: Palm Beach County, Florida
Project Type: Enviornmental
Procurement Type: Contract – $79 Million
The South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD) hired Bergeron Land Development (BLD) to expand the Stormwater Treatment Area (STA-1W) in Palm Beach County in 2015. The scope of the project included developing 4,600 acres of inactive farmland located within the 11,100-acre Gladeview Water Control District.
Bergeron Land Development headed the construction of an additional stormwater treatment area for the agricultural stormwater runoff in the surrounding areas. This phosphorous-rich runoff can now be treated using a series of spillways, overflow weirs, box culverts and ultimately be conveyed by way of approximately 11 miles of newly constructed collection, spreader, and discharge canals.
The work included more than 3.2 million cubic yards of excavation and embankment to create the canals and levees. This project, which was completed in September 2019, eliminates the need for the SFWMD to construct a new seepage canal and seepage pump station.
Bergeron also performed soil inversion, a process that allows land that was previously used for agricultural purposes to be utilized to treat environmentally harmful runoff. Soil inversion also helps with the performance of older STAs that have seen their effective decline over years of treatment. The previous land use resulted in high copper contamination and inverting the soil reduced these concentrations as much as practical. Additionally, Bergeron also used soil inversion to reduce high concentrations of phosphorus in another cell of the project. The soil inversion process utilizes farm equipment to prepare and invert the soils up to forty-two (42”) inches in many of the 1976 acres on the site.
