Rowen Phase 1 Roadways & Infrastructure

Project Scope

Reeves Young was chosen as the General Contractor to provide the necessary roadways and infrastructure for Rowen, a 2,000-acre mixed-use community hosting environment, agriculture, and medicine companies and is focused on innovation.

The project consists of installing two miles of divided roadway with walking and biking trails. Within these two miles of roadway, Reeves Young was also responsible for the complete installation of storm drainage, water and sewer utilities, power and fiber duct banks, and several small parks and sitting areas along the trails. This phase of the project is one of five.

Location:

Dacula, GA

Client:

Rowen Foundation Inc.

Challenge Faced

This massive project site contained hundreds of acres of historic trees that needed to remain undisturbed. Additionally, two active streams had to be temporarily crossed for construction operations and then permanently crossed with the constructed roadway. Geotechnical engineering reports identified many areas of dense, natural rock that had to be removed for utility and roadway construction to begin.

Solution Provided

Significant planning and constructability reviews were conducted to determine the strategy for constructing the roadways and infrastructure within the necessary rights-of-way (ROW) to limit the disturbance of the historic trees and maintain the natural integrity of the site. The roadway was designed to follow natural terrain and avoid wetland areas. Within the natural terrain, limits of disturbance were designed to avoid harming these historic trees and to preserve the “natural” feel of the property. All the landscaping installed on the site was selected from native plantings.

The property’s streams had to remain undisturbed, and the use of precast concrete arched culverts enabled this. The culverts do not have bottoms, allowing the streams to flow naturally. The arch culverts were sat on driven pile foundations with concrete footings. The dense, natural rock on the project site had to be blasted with explosives, removed with large equipment, and processed in a rock crusher. Processing and crushing the rock enabled it to be reused on-site as fill, reducing the amount of material leaving the project site. This also reduced the amount of crushed rock that had to be imported from a local quarry for construction backfill.