Altoona Water Treatment Plant No. 4

Story Construction is serving the City of Altoona as its Construction Manager at Risk, making the project the first water treatment plant in Iowa funded through the Drinking Water SRF program to be delivered through CM at Risk delivery. The lead design professional is McClure Engineering Company with Neumann Monson and IMEG serving as sub-consultants to McClure.

The water treatment plant is part of an overall water systems improvement. In addition to the plant, the City is also improving its raw water source capacity, raw water transmission mains, and finished water transmission mains. During design and preconstruction, the Story Construction team produced a cost opinion at 60% and 90% of design, guided layout and logistics of the new plant, and provided constructability input. In guiding site layout and logistics, the team ensured that design of the new plant is complementary to construction activities, ultimately shortening the expected duration of construction and lowering construction cost. Together with McClure, the Story Construction team also facilitated an early bid issuance in January for sitework and utilities, allowing those scopes of work to begin sooner and create room in the construction schedule for a required settling period prior to building structures.

The Story Construction team coordinated strategic packaging of scopes of work for bidding and led the prequalification process for interested bidders for each scope of work. Documents were released to prequalified bidders in January and bids were taken on Feb. 26, ultimately coming in 4.5% under the expected cost. Story Construction submitted a bid to self-perform concrete and exposed process piping work, and was ultimately the apparent low bidder, resulting in award of this package to Story to perform with its own crews.

The new plant will feature a new 220’ x 160’ treatment building containing three 12’ diameter x 42’ long pressure filters, four 12’ diameter x 16’ tall ion exchange softeners, and associated pumping to deliver 4 MGD of drinking water (expandable to 8 MGD in the future) to the fast-growing community. The project also includes a new 1.5-million-gallon ground storage reservoir, a new 2,530’ deep Jordan aquifer well co-located on the Water Treatment Plant site and associated low- and high-service pumps. Construction began in March and the new plant is scheduled to be online in January 2028.