LEA’s Civil Team has a range of services related to water resources. In Ontario specifically, LEA expanded our services to add a new specialty: Drainage and Hydrology Engineering for Highways. While this work is specific to Ontario, the tools we use and the expertise we have can be utilized on projects throughout Canada, and ultimately, with further research, this work can extend internationally as well.
Services provided within this specialty include:
- Watershed hydraulic analysis
- Hydraulic analysis of bridges and culverts
- Stormwater management strategy
- Floodplain mapping analysis and updates
- Erosion and sediment control
- Hydraulic analysis of watermains and water distribution systems
These services often extend to other engineering disciplines at LEA, such as transportation. Our Civil and Transportation Teams work closely to create and update InfoWorks models for the purpose of analyzing the hydraulic condition of sewers. Information such as road profiles, cross-sections, ditch design, and land use are key parameters for any InfoWorks model and communication between disciplines is key.
InfoWorks is one of the industry’s most powerful modelling tools for hydraulic analysis. With this tool, our team has the capability and resources to provide a range of services. This includes downstream capacity analysis of sanitary sewer systems, a requirement for zoning by-law amendment approval in all development engineering projects for the City of Toronto. In addition, our team expertly uses InfoWorks to provide storm sewer system analysis: through InfoWorks modelling, LEA’s Civil Team can accurately depict the real-world conditions of underground sewers during extreme storm events. InfoWorks is used to optimize and provide the most cost efficient and hydraulically sound design for storm, sanitary and combined sewer systems.
InfoWorks is particularly important in various projects within the City of Toronto; the City requires consultants to prove that the proposed site development does not cause a negative impact to the existing sewer infrastructure. In the past two years, LEA’s Civil Team has worked on sixteen projects related to storm and sanitary sewer system analysis using InfoWorks within the City of Toronto, in which a total of 32km of storm and sanitary sewer systems were analyzed.
In addition to InfoWorks, the Civil Team at LEA also uses InfoWater, a comprehensive decision-support tool for water distribution networks and watermains. This software helps improve understanding of how water infrastructure behaves as a system, how it reacts to operational strategies, and how the infrastructure should grow as population and demand increase. InfoWater provides our team the capability to run fire flow and water quality simulations, and energy cost analysis in a flexible multiplatform environment.
ArcMap, a part of Esri’s ArcGIS suite of geospatial processing programs, is primarily used to view, edit, create, and analyze geospatial data. Working concurrently with InfoWorks and InfoWater, the ArcGIS software can be used to analyze the hydraulic condition of various existing and proposed sewer networks and perform watermain analysis. The direct integration of ArcGIS provides a high level of performance and flexibility.
The software and technology our team uses allows our team to provide exceptional service to our clients.
LEA undertook drainage and stormwater management design for the Regional Express Rail – Davenport Rail Grade Separation Project. For this project, an InfoWorks model was created in-house entirely from scratch to analyze and design the storm sewers along Metrolinx corridor from Davenport Road to Bloor Street, as well as the municipal sewers downstream of the rail corridor. Additionally, a combined sewer InfoWorks model was created using the City of Toronto’s background data to analyze the downstream impact on the City’s sewer during a dewatering operation.
Other notable projects include: watermain design as a part of the Poplar/Henderson Roadway reconstruction project for the Town of Aurora, watermain analysis using InfoWater for 705 Warden Avenue for CreateTO, and municipal servicing design (storm, sanitary, and watermain) along the Beecroft Road extension from Drewery Avenue to Finch Avenue for the City of Toronto.
Special thanks to Cristina Illiescu, Craig Li, Jonathan Ngan, and Mahdi Noori for their contributions to this article.