Owner’s Engineer – San Diego Gas & Electric CNF Program

San Diego County, CA

ECI served as Owner Engineer for San Diego Gas & Electric for their Cleveland National Forest Master Special Use Permit and Permit to Construct Power Line Project (CNF Project).  SDG&E’s CNF Project was a massive $550M fire-hardening project aimed at replacing approximately 2000 wood poles with steel, across 20 transmission line and distribution line segments totaling 150 miles in length.  The project also included undergrounding of distribution circuits, as well as a short segment of 69 kV transmission.  Transmission line segments were characterized as mostly having distribution underbuild.  Foundations for angle and deadend poles consisted mostly of micropile foundations, though drilled piers were installed in some areas where access and subsurface conditions have permitted.

The project was delivered design-build with ECI as SDG&E’s Owner Engineer responsible for the engineering review of the Design Builder’s work including design submittals, foundation submittals, procurement submittals, and Request for Information (RFI) submittals.  Design submittals included 30, 60, 90 percent and IFC’s.  Foundation submittals included micropile specifications and design, and traditional drilled pier designs. Procurement submittals included the review of all steel poles (point load drawings, design reports, structure shop drawings), conductors, OPGW and pole line hardware.

In addition to reviewing submittals for technical compliance with specifications, ECI was also responsible for distributing and compiling comments from SDG&E’s project stakeholders including Transmission, Distribution, Civil, Environmental, and Right-of-Way. ECI developed an efficient and effective system to assure that all stakeholders were scheduled, performed their review, and that all comments were compiled and returned to the Design-Builder.

Additional Owner Engineer responsibilities included support of permit compliance related to all of SDG&E’s access roads within the Cleveland National Park.  ECI surveyed all access roads for compliance with permit requirements. 

Where required, ECI was responsible for designing access road solutions to meet strict design, construction, environment and ROW stipulations. ECI’s Owner Engineer role has also required close coordination and development of steel distribution specifications with SDG&E’s Distribution Standards group as current distribution standards were detailed only for wood pole construction.  SDG&E’s Standards group and ECI jointly developed new distribution standards for steel pole construction concurrently or just-ahead of the CNF’s project design. 

As Owner Engineer, ECI participated in all meetings on behalf of SDG&E, both internal as well as those between SDG&E and the Design-Builder.  ECI managed five team members (subcontractors) to complete all Owner Engineer responsibilities.  ECI’s team members brought specific expertise to the project, including micropile foundation design and drainage design (for access road areas) experience.  ECI maintained a full-time, on-site team of project engineers to provide detailed coordination of Owner Engineer responsibilities successfully integrated into the project to function as key members of SDG&E’s overall team.

  • 150 Miles of rebuild
  • Fire-hardening, wood to steel conversion, 2000 poles
  • 69 kV and 12 kV, overhead and underground
  • Micropile and drilled pier foundations

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