City of Wichita Wichita, Kansas

Progressive design-build delivery of the largest infrastructure project in Wichita’s history

Providing the community with high-quality, reliable drinking water

Under progressive design-build delivery, an Alberici joint venture is building a new 120 MGD water treatment facility for the City of Wichita. The City’s existing water treatment plant is 80 years old and lacks necessary redundancies, making it vulnerable to failure. The new state-of-the-art facility will be fully redundant and will provide clean drinking water for the growing region.

Built-in reliability

The plant is designed to treat water from three different sources, wellfield water, surface water, and water from the City’s ASR Surface Water Treatment Plant. The ability to treat any blend of water source adds efficiency and drought resiliency. Our team’s flexible plant design includes a tornado-proof backup generator to support the electrical system, ensuring the plant is always able to deliver water to the City of Wichita.

State-of-the-art water treatment plant

All water sources can be blended or isolated before reaching headworks facilities. Primary treatment will include six solids contact clarifier (SCC) units that use lime softening to achieve targets for finished water hardness and total organic carbon removal. Chlorine disinfection contact basins will disinfect water with free chlorine, while microorganism removal and inactivation will occur through lime softening, filtration, and disinfection. Finished water will be delivered directly to the distribution system via a new high service pump station (HSPS) at the water treatment facility, or it will be stored at the Hess Reservoir before being pumped into the distribution system.

Delivering value through collaboration

Through progressive design-build delivery and collaboration with the City, our team provided the early cost-certainty, $14 million in cost savings, and innovative design solutions. For example, the team completed a pilot project to verify an approach to use dual-media filters that will reduce filter footprint by 20 percent.