Project Summary
Scouten was engaged to provide civil design, drafting, and construction period services to Britco LP for a 2,500-person worker accommodation area in northern Manitoba. We collaborated with our client to plan, design, and implement civil works, including stripping, grading, and filling plans for the site.
Project Description
Scouten Engineering provided civil design, drafting, and construction period services to Britco LP (now Metric Modular Ltd.) on a design-build basis for a 2,500 person worker accommodation area in northern Manitoba in connection with the Keeyask Hydroelectric project. Planning, design, and implementation of the civil works was conducted on a collaborative basis with our client and delivered to the project owner in accordance with the project’s overall specifications.
The site was particularly challenging and consisted of deep organic soils (peat) overlying ice-rich sporadic permafrost. The site was poorly drained generally but chosen as the only practical alternative for the project. Scouten Engineering designed a unique arrangement of internal subgrade drainage galleries of a large perimeter drainage collection system around the 25-hectare site. The drainage scheme, discharging to a large, purpose-built outfall, allowed the local phreatic surface (water table) to be dropped by approximately 3 metres. This arrangement permitted the majority of the construction to be completed ‘in the dry.’
Scouten developed stripping, grading, and filling plans for the site to match various uses at the surface (dormitories, recreation buildings, roads, parking areas, etc.). The design intention was to elevate the built-up site to permit gravity flow of all storm and sanitary drainage and to protect the underlying sporadic permafrost. In total, over 600,000 m3 of common sand and processed sub-base and granular base materials were used to bring the site to final grade. Because of the sub-arctic environment at the site the entirety of the water supply and distribution system and the majority of the sanitary sewage collection and disposal system had to be insulated and heat-traced. Very careful consideration had to be made with respect to water and sewage velocities in the various distribution and collection pipes in order to avoid freezing under the harshest of winter conditions.