Polar Beverages Warehouse Installs CULTEC Storm Water System

Polar Beverages, an independent soft-drink bottler that mainly distributes its products in New England and upstate New York, has a manufacturing facility in Auburn, Mass., as well as several warehouses in the area. As the company faced the need for increased storage space, Polar leased a large warehouse in Auburn with an eye toward not only expanding its storage capacity but also consolidating most of its warehouses in this new location.

The engineers at Land Planning Inc. designed a 112,500-sq-ft addition to the existing 168,550-sq-ft building, increasing the amount of impervious surfaces onsite. It also had to design a storm water system that would infiltrate clean rooftop runoff back into the ground, recharging the groundwater. The amount of post-development runoff recharged back into the ground needed to be equal to or greater than the pre-development amount, as required by the local regulations.

While the engineers had enough space for capturing storm water runoff from the parking lot and other ground-level surfaces in an above-ground detention system, the site had no space for an infiltration system. Land Planning specialists decided to use an underground infiltration chamber system provided by CULTEC, a company whose systems they had specified in the past.

For the project, the engineers selected CULTEC’s Recharger V8, the company’s largest capacity plastic chamber, able to hold a minimum of about 100 cu ft of water when installed according to CULTEC’s instructions. It is 32 in. high and 60 in. wide, with a bare chamber capacity of 8.68 cu ft per ln ft. Located under the parking lot, the system captures rooftop runoff and slowly infiltrates it into the ground, replenishing the surrounding soil and aquifer.

The storm water runoff from the parking lot follows to a Stormceptor unit for filtration and then the excess storm water is sent into an extended detention wetland located beyond the parking lot. CULTEC’s system occupies 9,000 sq ft of the 19.2-acre warehouse site, offering approximately 21,946 cu ft of storage capacity. The installation began with excavating a bed, laying filter fabric along the sides and bottom and adding a layer of crushed stone. After the V8 chambers were in place, they were backfilled with stone, covered with a layer of fabric designed to reinforce the system to better bear traffic loads and prepared for asphalt.

“The installation process took less than one week, which was very reasonable for such a large system,” said Jeffrey Murray with Patriot Environmental Corp., the project contractor. “I was happy with the ease of installation as well as with the fact that CULTEC’s representative provided all the necessary site-specific sketches and field assistance during the installation.”

Source: CULTEC