London, Ontario Completes Berm and Sheet Pile Flood Defenses at Two Treatment Plants
The City of London, Ontario has completed flood protection upgrades at its Greenway wastewater treatment plant and is continuing similar work at its Adelaide plant, building a combined 450-metre sheet pile wall and earthen berm system designed to withstand one-in-250-year floods, Daily Commercial News reports.
Market Impact
The $25 million Greenway project, which began in 2024 and wraps up this September, includes a new effluent pumping station to keep the plant fully treating wastewater during flood events. Crews used roughly 10,000 cubic metres of imported clay and 2,500 cubic metres of reused stockpiled topsoil to build the berm, with sheet pile wall installed where space was too tight for earthwork. A separate $23 million project at the Adelaide plant, also started in 2024 but running through the end of 2027, added a berm built from 14,000 cubic metres of imported clay and 2,000 cubic metres of reused topsoil, plus an effluent pumping station and a flow equalization tank for wet weather management.
Kirby Oudekerk, the city’s division manager for wastewater treatment operations, says both plants sit in low-lying ground next to the Thames River because sewage collection relies on gravity, exposing them to flood risk. He notes that more than $1 billion in infrastructure could be affected without protection in place. A 2018 flood that submerged Greenway’s west access road, along with updated Thames River flood elevation data, reinforced the need for the work. The city secured 40% federal funding for both projects through the Disaster Mitigation and Adaptation Fund.
CIMA+ served as design consultant and contract administrator on both jobs, with Onterris (formerly Montrose Environmental) as civil consultant. Stone Town Construction is general contractor at both sites and built the Greenway berm directly, while subcontracting the Adelaide berm work to Bre-Ex Construction.
What It Means for Subcontractors
- Heavy-civil and geotechnical subs should note the material scale involved: 10,000 to 14,000 cubic metres of imported clay per site, plus reused topsoil, giving a sense of earthwork volume for similarly sized municipal flood-berm packages.
- Sheet pile installation crews have a concrete reference point: Greenway required sheet pile wall in areas where berm footprint wasn’t feasible, a design workaround worth flagging when bidding space-constrained treatment plant sites.
- General contractors managing multi-site municipal work can point to London’s approach of pre-qualifying one contractor pool and using a single design consultant (CIMA+) across two projects as a model for efficiency when pitching similar dual-site packages.
- Site restoration and landscaping subs should track tree replacement obligations, since almost 100 trees were removed at Greenway and will be replaced under the city’s tree replacement program.
- Firms tracking funding sources should note the 40% federal cost-share came through Canada’s Disaster Mitigation and Adaptation Fund, a program worth monitoring for future municipal wastewater flood-protection bid packages.
- Access road and site infrastructure crews should note both projects included upgrading access roads to maintain vehicle access during construction and post-flood conditions, a recurring scope item on similar plant-protection jobs.
