The fourteen-acre roof moved large amounts of water onto the parking lot, whether from morning dew or from heavy rainstorms. Hundreds of 18 wheelers arriving and departing each day, along with the erosive effects of water had destroyed the parking lot surface. An engineer designed a system that would funnel water from the existing downspouts using 18” HDPE pipes located halfway up the building walls and divert them to the underground connectors. The system was engineered to handle a one-hundred-year rain event.

Titan originally bid the project based upon the materials and specifications provided by the engineer. But with a price tag of over $1,500,000, Autozone decided to cancel the project even though the original goal was to protect their multi-million-dollar investment in their new parking lot.

Using a value engineering approach, Titan was able to provide an alternative that accomplished the same objective but at a quarter of the cost.

Halfway up the building walls, a custom fabricated metal trough made of 18-gauge steel and 24” in width replaced the more expensive HDPE pipes. Over 900 specially-designed metal brackets anchored the trough to the walls every 24” providing enough strength to support the weight of two men standing in a ten-foot section of the trough to simulate the water produced by a one-hundred-year event rainstorm. Existing gutters were cut back and diverted to the trough, and the trough was connected to the underground HDPE connectors at twelve strategic locations around the perimeter of the building

They say that if the only tool you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail. At Titan Contractors, we pride ourselves on looking at the problem from the perspective of our customers and then finding the right tool and the right solution. Using our collective thinking, we were able to provide an alternative solution that met the original goal of keeping large volumes of water away from the parking lot surface.

Today, the parking lot and driveways are desert dry each morning despite the hundreds of gallons of morning dew that come off the roof, and the gutter/trough solution has moved even the heaviest of rainstorms efficiently into the underground drainage system, helping to preserve Autozone’s investment into their new parking lot.