The podcast by project managers for project managers. The largest infrastructure project in the history of the Seattle Public Utilities is the Ship Canal Water Quality Project. Keith Ward talks about the lessons learned overseeing this 11-year initiative. Hear about estimating and revising a $570 million budget, and building strong relationships with multiple stakeholders and project teams.

Table of Contents

01:37 … Keith’s Current SPU Role02:26 … Ship Canal Water Quality Program06:47 … Using Tunnels Instead of Tanks08:37 … A Tunnel Boring Machine11:39 … MudHoney15:12 … Project Stakeholders18:08 … Challenges with Multiple Teams22:06 … Project Funding23:20 … Federal Consent Decree25:31 … Budget Estimating for a Megaproject28:59 … When Costs Change31:44 … Budget Setting Lessons Learned32:54 … Monte Carlo Analysis38:47 … Tracking a Lengthy Project39:53 … Final Words of Advice41:10 … Get in Contact with Keith43:44 … Closing

KEITH WARD: ...because I want people to learn from our lessons learned here. There’s a lot.  I’ve learned a lot personally, and it’s been a really eye-opening experience.  And I want to clarify, this is a megaproject.  This isn’t a $2 million project; right?  This is in another category.  So, and I think that’s one of the lessons learned is when you move into this megaproject, like over a half billion, the degree of uncertainty is huge, and you need to account for that.  That’s one of the kind of I would say über lessons learned. I’ve learned a lot personally, and it’s been a really eye-opening experience. 

WENDY GROUNDS:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  I’m Wendy Grounds, and in the studio with me is Bill Yates.  I want to say a big thank you to our listeners who reach out to us and leave comments on our website or on social media.  We love hearing from you.  And it was actually from a listener that we have today’s guest.  Chris Stoll reached out, and he recommended our guest who we’re talking to today.  And we are very grateful to Chris, and we appreciate it when any of you reach out to us and send us ideas of guests.

So our guest today is Keith Ward.  He is currently the project executive of the Seattle Ship Canal Water Quality Project, and he’s going to go into some detail on that.

BILL YATES:  We’re going to talk about tunnel boring machines, federal consent decrees, and MudHoney.  Are you ready for this?

WENDY GROUNDS:  I’m ready for MudHoney.  Hi, Keith.  Welcome, and thank you for joining us today.

KEITH WARD:  So nice to be here.  Thanks, Wendy.

Keith’s Current SPU Role

WENDY GROUNDS:  We saw that you have been with the Seattle Public Utilities since 2002.  Can you tell us about the services they provide, and your role in the company?

KEITH WARD:  Sure.  So Seattle Public Utilities is kind of four utilities in one.  And I’ll kind of use the term “SPU” sometimes.  I’ll bounce back and forth.  We deliver essential water and waste services to about 1.5 million people in the Greater Seattle area.  So really our four services are drinking water, drainage and wastewater, and solid waste services.  I’ve had a variety of roles, mostly in project delivery, at SPU since coming onboard 2002.  My current role is the project executive on the Ship Canal Water Quality Project, which is the largest infrastructure project in the history of the organization.

Ship Canal Water Quality Program

BILL YATES:  Now, that we want to get into.  This Ship Canal Water Quality program, why was this initiated?  What’s the problem that it’s trying to address?

KEITH WARD:  Yeah.  It’s a problem that’s common to many kind of older cities.  We don’t think of Seattle as always an older city.  But a lot of our infrastructure was built over a hundred years ago.  So this project was initiated in 2014 to solve the problem of what we call “combined sewage overflow.”  So back a hundred years ago there was no treatment for sewage, and they just basically installed one pipe in the street, and it went to the closest water body.  And that was common across the United States; right?

BILL YATES:  It’s hard to imagine, but that was it; right?  That was the solution.

KEITH WARD:  Exactly.  And those caused all kinds of problems with cholera and all kinds of different issues.  So this pipe has to convey both sewage and storm water from the streets and houses.  And it’s really the storm water that’s one of the biggest problems because in large storm events all this storm water or drainage comes into these pipes, which now we’ve hooked all these pipes up to tunnels, which eventually go to a wastewater treatment plant that the county owns.  So on a dry day, or a small storm, all this gets treated, and then it’s discharged, just like we want.

But on really large flows, large rain events, it overwhelms the system.  And we either have to back up into residence and businesses or have it come out of the street, or we have – the City of Seattle has 82 overflow points across the city.  King County, our partner, has 35.  We need to basically overflow this.  And that can be harmful to fish, wildlife, and swimmers.  So both agencies, the City of Seattle and King County, are under federal consent decrees to reduce the number of these overflows.  And like I said, most agencies across the nation have been or are under similar consent decrees to fix these historical problems.

So the Ship Canal is a local waterway and the focus of this project.  Currently, combined sewage overflows occur about 104 times per year on average.  And in 2020 these overflows represented about 56 million gallons of this polluted storm water and sewage out of our 85 million gallons total.  So this project will protect our waterways, keeping this polluted storm water and sewage out and improve public health by bringing these overflows down to less than one per overflow.  So basically we have six overflow locations.  We’re going to take them from 104 down to six.  And that will keep an average of more than 75 million gallons of combined sewage overflow out of this local waterway.  So that’s the problem that we’re trying to fix.

And then let me just explain really quick the project itself.  And had I been involved earlier, I would have called the Ship Canal Water Quality Program because it’s really a program of four major construction projects.  In over a seven-year period we will end up constructing a 2.7-mile long, 18’10” diameter storage tunnel.  And this diameter is about the same as your standard transit tunnel.  So if you’ve ever been on a subway tunnel, that’s about an 18’10, kind of what we call your “bread and butter.”  And what will provide about 30 million gallons of storage capacity that we can put this combined sewage overflow into during these storm events.

In order to get it down into this deep tunnel, we have to install five deep drop shafts at five neighborhood sites across the city.  These are vertical shafts that bring it down in and allow us to get in for maintenance.  And then we actually have to connect some flows around these shafts into the shafts, so we’re going to actually have two additional tunnels.  So we actually have three tunnels overall in the project, about a 650-foot long and 2,000-foot long tunnels.  One of these is underneath the Ship Canal.  That’s currently actually being mined right now. 

And once we finish all of our tunnels, we will basically, in our shaft that we’re using for all the tunneling, when they’re finished we will build a 12-million gallon per day pump station that will basically drain the tunnel when the treatment plant is ready so that we can get ready for the next storm.  So that’s the entire program.

Using Tunnels Instead of Tanks

BILL YATES:  I’ve just got to bring this up because Seattle is a beautiful city, one of the most beautiful cities certainly in the U.S., if not in the world.  There’s water all around it.  There’s Puget Sound, there’s Lake Washington, the ocean.  It’s just gorgeous.  And I think about what you’re doing, you’re preserving the beauty of Seattle and the water that is there.  So you guys chose tunnels instead of tanks, which I appreciate because, you know, no matter what kind of artwork you put on it, a tank is still a tank.  Talk about the complexity that was added by choosing tunnels instead of tanks.

KEITH WARD:  Sure.  These were early decisions between the two agencies and when they decided to kind of come together.  Started back in 2013.  So we have different tools in our toolbox to solve this problem.  When you get really large volumes like this, you need to go to what we call “storage” or “tanks.”  These generally in an urban environment would be underground concrete tanks.  So we were kind of looking at installing at each of these six locations underground storage tanks.  But you need a lot of property to do that.  So we would have had to condemn private property, and there would have been a lot of construction impacts, much more than when you’re doing a tunnel.

So that led us to start thinking about, first of all, a tunnel, and then a share tunnel.  And the cost ended up being about the same.  We ended up going down the share tunnel route because it would be much less impact for the local communities, less condemnation.  And actually, because it’s over three miles, it gives us more operational flexibility because what we’re starting to see is kind of storm patterns changing where we get these micro storms.  So on one end of the tunnel we may get a really hard storm, and on the other end it’s not as bad.  So instead of just having one tank, we can put more into the tunnel at that specific location.

A Tunnel Boring Machine

WENDY GROUNDS:  We did a podcast a while back with the Atlanta Watershed Project.  They described using a tunnel-boring machine to work through the tunnels that they’re building here in Atlanta.