Thomas County Central High School currently has 1,580 students and counting, but it has been using old and inadequate sports facilities and practice areas. To solve this problem, the school decided to build a new multipurpose building, two outdoor practice fields (one for the band, one for the football team) and one indoor practice field.
We completed the project while school was in session, which created issues with road access and disrupted daily activities. To prepare the area for construction, we brought in extra soil to level the ground. Since the available space was limited, we built retaining walls around certain parts of the site. We needed these walls because there wasn’t enough room for the usual and simpler sloped embankments.
Also, before construction could begin, we removed an existing parking lot and planned to replace it in a different area on campus.
Our solution for improving TCCHS’s facilities involved several key steps. First, we installed retaining walls to keep the soil in place for leveling the ground. Then, we added the new multipurpose building, a full-size outdoor football practice field, an outdoor field for the band and a full-size indoor football field inside a pre-engineered metal building. We also included a drainage system with a retention pond to handle water runoff from the new buildings and fields. Since we built where the parking lot used to be, we constructed the new parking lot before any of the main construction started.
Blake Crews, Bronson Nottage, Grant Penniman, Andrew Zalewa
O. Sean Martin, Ph.D., P.E. and Kamal Tafiq, Ph.D., P.E., FASCE
Crews Engineering – Randy Crews, P.E.
Fall