How to save $5 million

By Purnima Mudnal Independent One’s a surfer, another is a weight-conscious mom and the third is just plain laconic. But three city civil engineers have one thing in common: their efforts have saved the city more than $5 million.

Debbie DeBow

DeBow’s warm persona lights up the room as she smoothes out rolled-up project charts and blames her weight gain on the birth of her twin boys. She tries to avoid the jargon of her job but occasionally slips into it as she explains her role in the two-year demolition and reconstruction of the Overmyer Reservoir project.

The Overmyer project, at Huntington Street and Garfield Avenue, previously housed three small reservoirs built in the 1960s and like many other parts of the city’s infrastructure needed to be rehabilitated, replaced or just demolished. Examining the two smaller tanks, with a combined capacity of 2.5-million-gallons, and the large reservoir, DeBow and a team of design engineers, decided it would be cost-effective to demolish the two to make way for one large reservoir.

But DeBow and the design team didn’t stop at overhauling the 20-million gallon reservoir, which had a leaky roof and columns that wouldn’t withstand a tremor of an earthquake. They decided to use the Gunite or “shotcrete” method of spraying concrete on the reservoir walls with a huge pump instead of the labor-intensive method of pouring it on the reservoir. That alternate treatment saved the city $1 million, as well as ongoing labor savings from having fewer facilities to maintain.

After the project became a success, DeBow, who earlier had been afraid it wouldn’t work, said, “You don’t go home every time feeling like, ‘I saved the city some money today,’ or ‘I earned my pay check today,’ but this was one such time.”