By American Environmental Group – The floods affecting American waterways in 2011 have been, for many communities, historic, as have the engineering solutions being utilized. American Environmental Group, Ltd. (AEG) has been part of a first-of-its-kind emergency levee protection effort in Mississippi that has used impermeable geomembrane liner to help secure the backside of the Yazoo River Backwater Levee. This emergency strategy, directed by the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), is designed to prevent catastrophic erosion and failure of the levee in the event the flood water overtopped the levee.
“Everyone attended a strategy meeting on Friday, May 6th, where the USACE outlined the urgency, severity, and required resources for the project,” says Mike Joslin, AEGL Senior Operations Manager. “It was amazing and a credit to the firms involved, that Houston-based GSE was able to deliver the HDPE geomembrane rolls and that work was able to begin with a full workforce within 24 hours of that meeting.”
Near Vicksburg, MS, the water has been rising at a rate of nearly 1 foot per day as the swollen Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers converge. Five crews from AEGL worked with USACE to install approximately 3 million sq. ft. of textured 30 and 40-mil high-density polyethylene (HDPE) geomembrane.
The 4-mile-long installation involved more than 150 workers managing constant traffic atop the narrow levee road and enduring high heat conditions, along with the pressure of the river closing in each day.
“If a job this size was constructed under ‘normal’ circumstances,” says Jon Edens, the on-site Project Manager for AEGL, “you’d expect 15 or 20 people working in various stages over a 9 or 10 week period. Here, through constant communication and a teamwork approach between the USACE, AEGL, and Fordice Construction goals were kept aligned and enabled the team to complete the project in less than 5 days.”
Updates on the Mississippi levee work will be published soon. Visit www.aegl.net.
