Trenchless excavation construction in federal contracting.

Abstract

The industry related to Trenchless Excavation Construction (TEC) is seeing wide spread expansion. Technological developments in the last twenty years have been applied to TEC and now allow the installation of underground utility lines under previously developed properties and in difficult soil conditions. Large municipalities and industrial owners have greatly benefited from projects constructed using TEC. The Naval Facilities Engineering Command (NAVFAC) is the construction and maintenance arm of the Navy and manages projects world wide. It is governed in is contracting by the Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR) which among many things attempts to encourage fair and equitable administration of contracts. The FAR does this by restricting proprietary language and actions in government contracts and also by focusing contracts on final products versus construction methodology.Since TEC is new, unfamiliar, and is often viewed to be a methodology and not a final product, NAVFAC's specification writers have been concerned about addressing TEC in their contracts. The purpose of this research project is to give NAVFAC designers and specification writers a Guide Specification that allows for TEC, provides them a comparison project that shows how TEC may be utilized, and also to make them aware of the basic concepts of TEC via a NAVFAC magazine article.