Development Services Newsletter: February 2024

Civil Division

The Civil Division is responsible for reviewing and inspecting all the infrastructure improvements outside the building footprint for private development projects within the city. These projects range from single-family home subdivisions, multi-family apartments, industrial complexes, commercial centers, and manufacturing facilities such as Intel. The division oversees the platting process, which creates the individual lots, easements and public rights of way that are created with each development. The plan review team also reviews all the capital improvement projects (CIPs) for the Public Works Department which include roadway widening or rehabilitation, city park expansions, new buildings such as Fire Stations, and drainage improvements.

The infrastructure components for which civil performs plan review and construction inspection services include roadways, parking areas, access drives, concrete curbs and sidewalks, and asphalt pavement.

While much of the focus in Civil Engineering is often on the infrastructure we can easily see, such as our roadways, there is an elaborate network of underground utilities that is a major component of this division’s responsibility. These include the pressurized piping networks that distribute potable water and fire suppression to our homes and businesses, gravity sewer networks that collect our wastewater and convey it to the treatment plants, fiber lines that provide our internet services, and stormwater collection structures and pipes that remove rainfall runoff from our streets and parking lots and direct it to below ground storage chambers or surface retention basins.

These facilities exist beneath every road in Chandler that you drive on and every parking lot where you travel to work or shop. In Chandler alone, there are nearly 1,000 miles of sanitary sewer mains and 1,300 miles of water mains beneath our streets. For context, if all the water and sewer mains in Chandler were laid out in a straight line, it would extend from San Diego, California to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

This world beneath us requires extensive planning, design, inspection and testing to avoid pipe location conflicts, provide means for regular maintenance, and ensure the utilities will function properly for the public they serve. The pictures that follow provide some illustrations of this vast underground network that is not often considered by the public on a regular basis, but which is essential to our day-to-day comfort, health, and safety.