Water & Wastewater Facility and Pipeline Construction Englewood, Colorado
A plant cannot be switched off while you rebuild it.
Influent arrives tomorrow at the rate it arrived today, and the discharge permit has no construction exemption in it. Everything we do on an operating facility is built around that one fact — which is why the bypass plan exists before the demolition does.
6025 S Quebec St, Englewood, CO 80111
Mon–Fri 7:00 AM–4:30 PM MT ·
Colorado since 2002 ·
Registered in SAM.gov
Sheet P-1 Pay items, abbreviated
| Item | Description | Unit | Unit price |
|---|---|---|---|
| 02.10 | 8″ PVC water main, open cut, 6′ cover Pipe, bedding, backfill, compaction, testing and disinfection | LF | $185–$310 |
| 03.10 | 8″ PVC gravity sewer, 8–12′ depth Pipe, bedding, backfill, compaction, air and mandrel testing | LF | $210–$395 |
| 03.40 | 48″ sanitary manhole, 8–12′ Base, barrel, cone, frame and cover, vacuum tested | EA | $7,800–$13,500 |
| 05.20 | Cast-in-place water-retaining concrete Forming, reinforcing, placing, finishing and curing | CY | $1,450–$2,600 |
| 08.10 | Bypass pumping, 6–12 MGD Pumps, suction and discharge, redundancy, 24-hour attendance | DAY | $3,200–$9,400 |
| 09.10 | Shutdown and tie-in, planned Rehearsed, low-flow window, written procedure, contingency in place | EA | site visit |
Row bands follow the APWA locate code: W, Potable water potable water, SS, Sanitary sewer sanitary sewer. The full sheet, with pipe sizes, depths and the items that cannot be priced without a site visit, is on the unit price page.
A 1.0 The constraint
Everything difficult about this work comes from one sentence
You cannot turn off a city's wastewater.
A commercial building can be closed for a renovation. A road can be detoured. A wastewater treatment plant cannot be paused, because the thing it treats keeps arriving whether or not anybody is ready for it — and the permit that governs what leaves the plant does not have a clause suspending it during construction.
So the interesting question on a plant project is never “can you build it”. It is: what carries the flow while you do? That question is answered by a bypass plan, a sequence of temporary works, and a set of shutdown and tie-in procedures written and rehearsed before a machine moves — and the hours around those tie-ins are the only hours on the job when a city is genuinely exposed.
Getting it wrong is not a schedule problem. It is a permit violation, a headline, and a conversation with the state. That is the risk an owner is actually buying protection from, and it is what this company is organised around.
Before demolition
- The bypass plan
- Pump sizing against peak wet-weather flow, not average. Suction and discharge routing, redundancy, fuel, and who is watching it at three in the morning.
- The shutdown procedure
- Written, step by step, with the valve and gate positions named, a low-flow window chosen, and a stated point of no return.
- The tie-in sequence
- What is cut, in what order, and what happens if the next step is not possible. The contingency is written before the work, not invented during it.
- The restoration point
- What it takes to put the plant back the way it was, and how long that would take, at every stage of the work.
All four are set out on the bypass and shutdown page.
A 2.0 Scopes of work
Five scopes, each a line on a bid tab
Colour follows the APWA locate code rather than a brand palette: blue is potable water, green is sanitary sewer. It is what gets painted on the street before anyone digs, and it is the fastest way to see what a scope is actually about.
New water and wastewater treatment structures and process systems, from excavation and cast-in-place concrete through mechanical installation, commissioning and operator training.
- You receive
- Commissioning and startup records, O&M manuals, operator training
Rebuilding a process train while the plant keeps meeting its permit. Bypass pumping, staged demolition, tie-ins scheduled at low flow, and a written procedure for every hour the plant is vulnerable.
- You receive
- Bypass plan, shutdown and tie-in procedures, as-built record
Gravity sewer, water mains and force mains in open cut and by trenchless methods, including the surface restoration that is what a resident actually sees when it is finished.
- You receive
- Pressure and leakage tests, CCTV inspection, record drawings
Wet wells, valve vaults, pumps, piping, electrical and controls, and the standby power that decides what happens to a collection system when the grid goes down.
- You receive
- Commissioning record, control narrative verification, O&M manuals
Cast-in-place water-retaining concrete, vaults, tanks, headworks, grading, drainage and restoration — the civil scope that everything mechanical is bolted to.
- You receive
- Concrete test records, hydrostatic testing, record drawings
Typical spans are planning ranges for a scheduling conversation and assume a normal procurement path and workable weather. The span for your project comes from a schedule against a defined scope.
A 3.0 Self-perform
Owning the crews is how you own the sequence
More than 75% of the work on our projects is performed by our own workforce with our own equipment.
That is a number rather than an adjective, and it is worth explaining rather than asserting, because it is not obvious why it matters.
On a plant retrofit the schedule is not a list of tasks, it is a chain of dependencies around a live process. The bypass goes in, the flow moves, a structure comes down, a new one goes up, the tie-in happens in a low-flow window, the bypass comes out. Every link in that chain is exposed to whoever is doing the next one.
When the excavation, the concrete, the pipe and the site work belong to four different subcontractors with four different backlogs, the bypass runs for as long as the slowest of them takes. When they are the same crews, the sequence compresses to what the work actually requires — and the bypass, which is a real daily cost and a real daily risk, runs for the shortest possible time.
It also means the person who has to make the tie-in work is in the room when the sequence is written.
What that changes
| Brokered | Self-performed | |
|---|---|---|
| Bypass duration | Set by the slowest sub | Set by the work |
| Tie-in window | Negotiated between firms | Scheduled once |
| A found condition | A change order and a claim | A crew already on site |
| Who answers | Depends on the trade | One contractor |
Illustrative rather than a promise: some scopes are genuinely better let to a specialist, and we say which on the self-perform page rather than claiming to do everything.
Telephone before the design is finished
The cheapest hour on a municipal project is the one spent talking to a contractor while the drawings can still change. Tell us what the plant has to do, what it does now, and what the budget cycle looks like — we will tell you what it takes to build and what will be hard about building it while the plant keeps running.
RN Civil Construction, LLC · 6025 S Quebec St, Englewood, CO 80111
A 4.0 Sequence
Seven stages, three of which wait for somebody
Nothing is demolished before the bypass is running and proven. Nothing is buried before it is tested and recorded. Nothing is called complete before it is commissioned and the operators have been trained on it.
-
P1
Scope and budget
What the facility has to do, what it does now, what the permit requires, and which budget cycle the money sits in. Frequently years before there is a drawing.
early -
P2
Design and procurement
Hard bid, CMAR or progressive design-build. Each one changes when the price is fixed and who carries the design risk — see delivery methods.
3–12 months -
P3Hold point
Bypass and temporary works
Installed, started, proven under real flow, and attended. Nothing is demolished until the bypass has run successfully through a wet-weather event or an agreed equivalent test.
2–6 weeks -
P4
Demolition and construction
Staged so that the plant never loses more capacity than the bypass can carry, with the restoration point known at every stage.
per scope -
P5Hold point
Shutdown and tie-in
The highest-risk hours on the project. A written procedure, a low-flow window, a rehearsal, the owner's operators present, and a contingency that has been agreed rather than improvised.
hours -
P6Hold point
Testing and commissioning
Pressure, leakage, mandrel and CCTV on pipelines; hydrostatic on structures; functional and performance testing on process systems. Nothing is buried before it is tested and recorded.
2–8 weeks -
P7
Startup, training and closeout
Operators trained on what they now have to run, O&M manuals, as-built record drawings, and the warranty period. The people who operate it are the last audience, and the most important one.
4–8 weeks
A 5.0 Colorado
The ground and the season are not the same here
A schedule written for a mild climate does not survive contact with this state, and an out-of-region contractor learns that in their first October.
The earthwork season is short at elevation. Frost depth, freeze-thaw and the practical limits on placing and curing concrete compress the window for anything open-cut or cast-in-place. A schedule that does not name that window is a schedule that will move.
Altitude changes equipment and people. Engine performance, pump curves and crew output are not what the catalogue says at seven thousand feet, and a bypass sized from sea-level assumptions is a bypass that disappoints on the night it matters.
Water is legally complicated here. Colorado water is administered under a prior-appropriation system, and a project that touches a stream, a ditch or a wetland picks up permitting paths that have nothing to do with construction and everything to do with schedule.
The ground varies inside a single site. Expansive clay, cobble, shallow bedrock and high groundwater all exist within the front range, sometimes on the same parcel, and each one changes how a trench is supported and what it costs per foot.
Where we work
- Denver metro
- Englewood
- Littleton
- Aurora
- Arvada
- Boulder
- Longmont
- Fort Collins
- Greeley
- Colorado Springs
- Pueblo
- Grand Junction
- Western Slope
- Mountain communities
Based in Englewood, working the front range and the mountain and western communities. More on the service area page.
Placing water-retaining concrete or backfilling a trench outside the temperature and moisture limits does not save a week. It buys a defect that shows up at the hydrostatic test, or two winters later. We schedule around it and we say so at bid time.
A 6.0 Standing behind it
Claims this page refuses to make
There is no safety statistic on this site. No experience modification rate, no incident rate, no bonding capacity, no licence number, no named municipal client, no logo wall, no dollar volume, no count of projects completed and no photograph of somebody else's plant.
Not because they do not exist — a contractor who works for cities has all of them, and produces them at prequalification. But a number printed on a marketing page is not evidence, because you cannot verify it from the page, and this industry is full of pages that print them anyway.
What is here instead is checkable: a legal name you can look up, an address in Englewood you can drive to, a telephone number answered during working hours, a founding year, a federal registration you can search, published unit prices with a review date, and a named deliverable for every scope of work.
Ask and you will get the rest, sent to a named person who can check it: a bid bond and surety letter, current insurance certificates, the safety programme, references from owners and engineers, and prequalification packages in whatever format your agency uses. Telephone (303) 482-3059 or [email protected].
Everything in writing, before you ask
The documents most contractors bury in a footer are linked here on purpose.
All seven are also in the footer of every page on this site.