Location

New York, New York

Date

14 Apr 2004, 4:30 pm - 6:30 pm

Abstract

The City of Grand Forks, North Dakota obtains drinking water from both the Red and Red Lake Rivers using a system of river intakes, shallow pipelines, and pump stations. However, during flood events, the City often loses access to the system, and persistent landslides along the riverbanks easily damage shallow components. As a result, the City decided to construct a gravity system with new pipelines leading to the base of a 65-foot deep pump station. Several construction techniques were evaluated for the pump station, including a self-sinking caisson, which was chosen for the project. Because the proposed 60-foot-diameter caisson was larger and would be sunk deeper than any previous caisson in the area, and would penetrate through a highly plastic, weak and brittle clay, FLAC soil-structure interaction analyses were completed using a strain-softening soil model. The paper discusses the results of the modeling and the subsequent design steps taken to avoid bottom instability. The paper also describes the construction process.

Department(s)

Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering

Meeting Name

5th Conference of the International Conference on Case Histories in Geotechnical Engineering

Publisher

University of Missouri--Rolla

Document Version

Final Version

Rights

© 2004 University of Missouri--Rolla, All rights reserved.

Creative Commons Licensing

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Document Type

Article - Conference proceedings

File Type

text

Language

English

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Deep Caisson Sinking in Soft Soils, Grand Forks, North Dakota

New York, New York

The City of Grand Forks, North Dakota obtains drinking water from both the Red and Red Lake Rivers using a system of river intakes, shallow pipelines, and pump stations. However, during flood events, the City often loses access to the system, and persistent landslides along the riverbanks easily damage shallow components. As a result, the City decided to construct a gravity system with new pipelines leading to the base of a 65-foot deep pump station. Several construction techniques were evaluated for the pump station, including a self-sinking caisson, which was chosen for the project. Because the proposed 60-foot-diameter caisson was larger and would be sunk deeper than any previous caisson in the area, and would penetrate through a highly plastic, weak and brittle clay, FLAC soil-structure interaction analyses were completed using a strain-softening soil model. The paper discusses the results of the modeling and the subsequent design steps taken to avoid bottom instability. The paper also describes the construction process.