E 1.0
How a plant project actually runs
Seven stages, and three hold points where the work does not advance until something has been proven rather than assumed. The hold points are the whole method; everything else is ordinary construction management.
Hold point Three of the seven stages
On most construction projects the schedule is the governing document. On a plant that has to keep meeting its permit while it is rebuilt, the governing document is the sequence of construction, and the schedule is downstream of it.
The distinction is not academic. A schedule answers when things happen. A sequence answers what the plant is falling back on at each moment, and for how long it has no margin. Two sequences can produce identical schedules and expose the facility for wildly different numbers of days.
So the seven stages below are organised around exposure rather than around trades. Three of them are hold points: the work does not advance past them until a specific thing has been proven, in writing, and accepted. Each of those three sits immediately before a moment where the plant is vulnerable or where something is about to be buried.
An owner can use this page as a checklist. If a contractor's submitted sequence does not have something like these three hold points in it, the risk has not been removed — it has just been left out of the document.
Everything on this page follows from that one sentence. The collection system keeps delivering flow whether or not there is anywhere for it to go, and the consequence of getting it wrong is not a delay — it is a reportable release with the city's name on it.
The three hold points
- P3 — the bypass has run and been proven under real flow, before anything is demolished
- P5 — the tie-in procedure is written, rehearsed and resourced, with a point of no return and a contingency on both sides of it
- P6 — every test result is in hand and accepted against criteria agreed before startup, before anything is accepted or buried
Each has a written criterion agreed in advance and is released by the engineer or the owner's representative, not by us. A hold point a contractor can release by itself is a note, not a hold point.
E 2.0 The sequence
Seven stages
Spans are planning ranges for a project of ordinary size and assume a normal procurement path and workable weather.
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P1
Scope and budget
This starts years before there is a drawing, and frequently before there is money. What the facility has to do, what it does now, what the permit will require after the next renewal, and which budget cycle the money sits in.
This is the stage where a published unit price is worth something. A district cannot ask its board for a number it does not have, and the usual industry answer — telephone us for a quote — is useless two budget cycles out. The unit price page exists for this stage specifically.
What we can usefully do here costs nothing: look at what you have, tell you what class of project it is, and tell you which of the four variables — depth, groundwater, congestion, surface — is going to decide your number.
- You receive
- An order of magnitude you can take to a board, and an honest statement of what is not yet known.
early -
P2
Design and procurement
The design develops and the delivery method decides almost everything about what follows: when the price is fixed, who carries the design risk, and — most importantly on a retrofit — how early anybody who has done a tie-in gets to read the sequence.
Under hard bid, that is at bid time, which is frequently too late to change anything cheaply. Under CMAR or progressive design-build, it is during design, which is the point. The three methods are compared on delivery methods.
The investigation done at this stage is the cheapest money on the whole project. Potholing to confirm what is actually in the corridor, CCTV on the lines being tied into, a condition assessment on the structure being rehabilitated, and real flow data rather than a design value. Every dollar skipped here comes back as a change order with interest.
- You receive
- A bid or a proposal against defined documents, with the sequence submitted and reviewable.
3–12 months -
P3 Hold point
Bypass and temporary works
This is a hold point and it is the one we will not move for schedule.
The bypass is installed, started, and proven under real flow — through an actual wet-weather event, or through an agreed equivalent test where waiting for weather is not practical. It is sized on peak wet-weather flow taken from your own records, not on average flow, with redundancy above that. Then it is attended for as long as it is carrying flow.
Nothing is demolished and no process is taken out of service until that is done. Proving it is cheap. Discovering at two in the morning that the discharge line has a high point nobody accounted for, with a basin already out of service, is not.
Full detail: bypass, shutdown and tie-in.
- You receive
- A written bypass plan, the proving test result, and a plant that is still fully in service.
2–6 weeks -
P4
Demolition and construction
The long stage, and the one that looks like construction. Selective demolition inside an operating facility, excavation, concrete, pipe, structures, mechanical installation and site work, staged so the plant never loses more capacity than the bypass can carry.
The rule that governs the staging is that the restoration point has to be known at every moment. At any given hour, if something went wrong, what would we put back and how long would it take? A sequence where the answer to that is unclear for a week is a sequence with a hidden week of exposure in it.
Where we find a condition that does not match the record drawings — and on an older plant we usually do — work stops on that element, the owner and the engineer are told in writing the same day, and nothing is worked around until there is a decision.
- You receive
- Daily reports, submittal and test records, and written notice the day anything differs from the documents.
per scope -
P5 Hold point
Shutdown and tie-in
A hold point, and the highest-risk hours on the project.
A tie-in is not treated as a construction activity. It is treated as an operation: a window chosen for the lowest flow the system sees and away from forecast wet weather, a written step-by-step procedure issued in advance, a rehearsal walked on the plant with the operators, materials and spares staged and physically checked against the procedure, a written point of no return, and a contingency on both sides of it.
The owner's operators are present, not as observers. They know things about the plant that are not in any document, and the person who will live with the consequence should be able to stop the work.
Everything else on a retrofit can be recovered from. This cannot, which is why it gets the planning it does.
- You receive
- The written tie-in procedure in advance, and a completed tie-in with the plant in compliance throughout.
hours -
P6 Hold point
Testing and commissioning
A hold point: nothing is accepted before it is tested, and nothing is buried before it is recorded.
Pressure, leakage, disinfection and bacteriological clearance on water main. Air, mandrel and CCTV on gravity sewer. Vacuum testing on manholes. Hydrostatic leakage testing on water-retaining structures. Functional and performance testing on process systems, against acceptance criteria agreed in writing before startup rather than negotiated during it.
Commissioning takes longer than anybody plans for — four to eight weeks on a plant project is realistic from first functional test to operators running it unaided, and that assumes the equipment arrived and the controls integrator is available. It is the phase most often compressed in a schedule and the phase where compression does the most damage, because the people who lose are the operators.
One test we insist on that is often skipped: the alarm path, end to end. A level alarm that lights a panel nobody is looking at is not an alarm. And a generator that has started is not a generator that has been load-tested.
- You receive
- Every test result in writing, and written acceptance against criteria agreed beforehand.
2–8 weeks -
P7
Startup, training and closeout
The operators are the last audience and the most important one. They will live with this facility every day for decades, long after everybody else has moved on to the next project.
So: training on what they now have to run, with written materials, delivered by people who built it. O&M manuals assembled and indexed in the format the owner's records require. As-built record drawings, surveyed and drafted to the owner's CAD standard. The warranty period begins, and the bypass demobilises last — after the new process has run and been accepted, because the cheapest time to still have a bypass is while you might still need one.
A project is complete when that package is submitted and accepted, not on the day the equipment went home. Final payment and retainage release are tied to it, and they should be.
- You receive
- Trained operators, O&M manuals, as-built record drawings, and a warranty that means something.
4–8 weeks
Stage references are used consistently across this site: the sequence table on bypass, shutdown and tie-in uses the same P1–P7 numbering, so a conversation about P5 means the same thing on every page.
E 3.0 Failure modes
The five ways this goes wrong
None of these is a construction failure. All five are planning failures, and all five are visible in a submitted sequence before anybody breaks ground.
| Failure | Decided at | Visible in |
|---|---|---|
| Bypass sized on average flow, overwhelmed by the first storm | Design, or the bid | The flow figure the bypass is sized on, and where it came from |
| Demolition started before the bypass was proven | The schedule | Whether P3 is a hold point or just an activity |
| Tie-in with no contingency, improvised at two in the morning | Weeks before, when nobody wrote the procedure | Whether a written tie-in procedure exists at all |
| Differing site condition worked around instead of reported | A crew's decision on a specific morning | Whether the contractor self-performs, and who the superintendent is |
| Commissioning compressed, operators handed a plant they cannot run | The last six weeks, under schedule pressure | How many weeks the schedule allows after the last tie-in |
The third column is the useful one at bid time. Every one of these is answerable from documents before award, and none of them is answerable from a reference call afterwards.
E 4.0 Questions
Questions about the process
The commercial ones — pay applications, retainage, weather days, standby, change orders — are in the payment and cancellation policy.
Why are there hold points at all? They cost schedule.
They cost schedule in exchange for removing the failure modes that cost far more. Each of the three — prove the bypass, get the tie-in right, test before acceptance — sits immediately before a point where the plant is exposed or where something gets buried. Passing one of them without proof does not remove the risk, it just moves the discovery to a worse moment. A hold point is visible in a schedule; a hidden week of exposure is not.
Who decides when a hold point has been satisfied?
Not us alone, and that is the point. Each hold point has a written criterion agreed in advance — the bypass proving test result, the completed tie-in procedure, the test records against the acceptance criteria — and the engineer or the owner's representative signs it off. A hold point a contractor can release by itself is not a hold point, it is a note.
What if the schedule cannot accommodate this?
Then the schedule is wrong and it is better to know in month one. We will say so during the bid period, in writing, as a question to the engineer, which sometimes makes us unpopular and is a great deal cheaper for everybody than the alternative. The one thing we will not do is agree to a sequence we do not think can be built and plan to argue about it later.
How much of this do you self-perform?
More than 75% of the work on a typical project, with our own workforce and our own equipment: the excavation, the concrete, the pipe, the structures, the demolition, the bypass and the site work. Electrical and instrumentation, trenchless crossings, coatings in immersion service and paving are subcontracted to specialists. The full breakdown, and how to verify it, is on what we self-perform.
Does the owner see the sequence before the work starts?
The owner should see it before the contract is awarded, and on a retrofit it should be the thing the bids are evaluated on. It is submitted in writing, it says which process comes out of service and what carries its load and for how long, and it should be interrogated hard. The questions worth asking are listed on bypass, shutdown and tie-in, and they are worth asking of everybody bidding, not only of us.
What happens if the plant goes out of compliance during construction?
It is reported, immediately, by the owner to the regulator, because that is the owner's legal obligation and nothing in a construction contract changes it. What we do is tell the owner the moment we know, in writing, with what happened and what we are doing about it. A contractor who delays telling an owner about an exceedance to protect a schedule has turned a construction problem into an enforcement problem.
Bring us in before the documents go out
The cheapest conversation on a plant retrofit is the one where somebody who has done a tie-in reads the sequence while it is still a drawing. That costs nothing and it has more leverage on the outcome than anything that happens afterwards.
RN Civil Construction, LLC · 6025 S Quebec St, Englewood, CO 80111