Month: October 2014

Groundwater Remediation System Restoration Project at a U.S. Navy Site in West Virginia.

Allegany Ballistics Laboratory Project: 2014

Hennigan Engineering Company, Inc. was retained by a large Environmental Services firm to video inspect, assess condition and clean / restore the groundwater remediation system at the Allegany Ballistics Laboratory (ABL) in Rocket Center, West Virginia. The ABL is operated by the Alliant Techsystems, Inc. (ATK). The overall groundwater remediation system was constructed and is run by Tikigaq / AGVIQ with CH2M Hill under contract with AGVIQ for water treatment facility Operations & Maintenance.

The system was originally installed over 10 years ago and includes several thousand feet of subsurface pipe, about 40 groundwater extraction wells, a water treatment facility, a water storage tower and a discharge / overflow system into the Potomac River. The system is in place to “capture” groundwater, divert is flow away from the Potomac River, remove chlorinated solvents from the groundwater water and discharge the treated water back into the river. The project is unique in that the treated groundwater is used by the ATK’s steam plant and also supports the site’s fire suppression systems. It is a critical operation to the sites ability to function. The systems performance had degraded over the years and had reached the point where it could no longer provided groundwater capture and was minimally able to meet the demands of the steam plant.

Hennigan Engineering utilized both hydrolase and jet blast equipment that ranged from 2,500 to 20, 000 psi with specialized cleaning heads to restore the system. Video inspection equipment included specialized high resolution cameras for pipe sizes from 1-inch to 6-inches in diameter. In addition, radio detection equipment was deployed to pin-point the location of critical features of the subsurface pipe.

Hennigan Engineering successfully video inspected the pipe system then restored its performance to flow levels that had never been achieved in the past – even when the system was first installed. This was done with negligible disturbance to the operation of the steam plant or compromise of the sites fire suppression system.

Hennigan Engineering developed a detailed Engineering report documenting the work, the results of the work and developed a scheduled maintenance program for maintain the system in the future.

Moving forward; Hennigan Engineering will be working with the client to keep the restored system operating at peak performance.