Palmdale area’s water project required several miles of extensive tunneling. Dalton hauled curved segments that were used to line the tunnels.

The City of Los Angeles awarded the contract to a joint venture of Kenny Construction, J.F. Shea, Traylor Bros., Ghazi Construction and Frontier Kemper Constructors for the East Central Interceptor (ECIS) project. This project consisted of several miles of tunnel lined with a large diameter cement liner. The liner is made up of 12,000 rings of cement, each one made up of six curved segments. That’s a total of 72,000 segments. Each curved segment, which constitutes 1/6th of a ring, is 15 feet by 5 feet, so you can imagine the diameter of the tunnel!

To meet the 1,000 day imposed construction schedule 48 ring sets were made each day. Remember, there are 6 segments in each ring, so that’s 288 segments a day. The need for in-house quality control and accurate delivery to a project of such numbers is a daunting logistical task. To meet these stringent requirements, Traylor Bros. and J.F. Shea Co. decided the most practical way to achieve this was to set up a manufacturing facility to control production and quality. So the group built a new state-of-the-art segment-casting plant to meet their needs.

The site for the new facility is near Palmdale, California. Ghazi Contractors designed and built the plant’s twin 20,000 square foot metal buildings. The plant was built off-site and completely erected in only 15 weeks. The plant uses a high-tech manufacturing method never before utilized in North America. One of the reasons the conglomerate invested so heavily in the facility is that they hope to secure another tunnel project which was currently under bid.

When segments were required at the tunnel site, the correct segments were loaded on a Dalton flat bed trailer, each one carrying a total of twelve segments. That’s enough to make two complete five foot long rings. Our trailers left the yard in darkness to arrive at the designated tunnel shaft at approximately 6am to avoid the heavy Los Angeles traffic on the freeways.

If you have need for a dependable long-term flatbed operation that can get your product to the customer or the job site in time, call Matt Klenske at (800) 333-2400 ext. 1560 to discuss your needs.