Gardenia Street Landfill Keiser Practice Field and Athletic Building

WGI prepared engineering design plans for an athletic building, practice field, parking areas, and stormwater retention area on and adjacent to a closed landfill. In addition to civil engineering services, the project involved environmental services related to contamination, trees, and wetlands.

WGI obtained approval for the project from the Florida Department of Health by designing around soil and groundwater contamination to the extent practicable, installing and sampling soil gas wells for methane, preparing action plans to address the potential discovery of buried debris during construction, and providing an environmental field inspector during excavation. WGI also obtained a de-watering permit from the South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD) for the construction of the athletic building; the permit was complicated by the presence of nearby groundwater contamination.

Our scientists determined that while some portions of the site were likely historically wetlands, the local hydrology had been diminished by regional stormwater management infrastructure to where the wetlands no longer provided any functional value. Reviewers from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) and SFWMD agreed that no jurisdictional wetlands were present. WGI adjusted the location of the parking lot to avoid a small surface water body regulated by the USACE. After this adjustment, no further wetland or surface water permitting was required for the project, which avoided a permit review period that could have taken up to a year.

WGI also conducted a tree inventory, identifying and locating 534 protected trees using a sub-meter accuracy GPS, and developed a tree mitigation plan.