Contractor LA Fuller & Sons, Amarillo, TX, recently had two options for bidding a large water improvement project in nearby Plainview:
?Submit a proposal to do the job by open-cut construction, a method with which the company has many years of experience; or
? Bid the job as a mostly-trenchless project, employing horizontal directional drilling to install the pipe.
Most contractors chose the usual course of action and submitted cut-and-cover bids. It would have been easy for Fuller & Sons to do the same; the company had never installed water pipe with a directional drill. But company owners J. Mark and Mike Fuller understood the benefits of trenchless construction and saw that the Plainview job seemed well suited for directional drilling.
After thoroughly investigating the relative costs and advantages of directional drilling compared to open-cut construction for the Plainview project, Fuller & Sons submitted an approximately $4 million bid to install more than 200,000 linear feet of restrained-joint PVC water pipe, with more than 90 percent of the work to be completed by directional drilling. Underground Construction, October 2001.
Trenchless Construction
