Earthwork & Site Work

The largest body of Mr. Parnell’s site work is the more than forty substation site-development projects at the City of Austin Electric Utility Department, later Austin Energy. A substation yard is a graded, drained, fenced platform on which heavy equipment foundations, oil containment, a control house, cable trench, and ground grid are set, and on many of the Austin sites that platform had to be cut and filled out of hilly terrain outside the city. His work covered the yard grading plan and finished-grade elevations, the balance of cut and fill, the yard drainage and its outlet to the delineated watershed, the gravel access road up to the yard, and the coordination of the graded platform with the equipment foundations, containment, and structures placed on it, as described under Foundations, Environmental, and Transportation.

For Greenhorne & O’Mara, Mr. Parnell worked on Brier Creek in northwest Raleigh during its initial development, where site grading had to be coordinated across multiple parcels and with the roadway network of a master-planned community that grew to two thousand acres. In Titusville, Florida, two site-development projects were graded around interconnected retention and detention ponds, with the pond excavations, berms, and the grading that directed runoff into them forming the core of each site’s earthwork; both were approved by the Titusville City Council. The commercial building projects at HagerSmith Design in Raleigh carried their own site grading and development alongside the building work.

The microwave and communications tower projects at KCI Technologies each required a graded compound in what was often wooded terrain: a level pad for the tower foundation and equipment shelter, a fenced perimeter, and an access drive from the nearest road, with clearing, grading, and drainage sized to the small footprint. The preliminary outparcel survey for a Hot ‘n Now franchise site was the front end of the same kind of small-site development.