Long Beach City College
Project Highlights
- Customer: McCarthy Building Companies
- Description: Education
- Location: Long Beach, CA
- Project: Long Beach City College
- Scope: Tree Installations, Shrub Placement, and Bioswales
The Client
Pierre Sprinkler and Landscape worked in collaboration with McCarthy Building Companies in transforming the black asphalt and narrow strip of grass located in the Liberal Arts Campus (Long Beach City College) into the latest “green” technology in construction. McCarthy Building Companies is the 10thlargest domestic general contractor according to Engineering News-Record, May 2010, and was the General Contractor on this project.
The Project
Pierre Sprinkler and Landscape partnered with McCarthy Building Companies as the irrigation and landscape contractor on the project. With the knowledge and experience in the field, Pierre jumped right in and completed a successfully “green” landscape and irrigation project.
The project first began with the irrigation work and landscape planting late 2010, and was completed early 2011. The Pierre team hydro-seeded more than 25,000 square feet of lawn and with bioswales, constructed the lawn and shrub areas . Bioswales, which are low areas designed to trap silt and pollutants from the surface runoff water, were created by digging trenches up to 3 1/2 ft. deep varying in widths and lengths then filling them with layers of pea gravel and sand.
Pierre came across a huge obstacle as Mother Nature stirred a series of continuous storms just as the grass seeding was starting to sprout. The bioswales proved to be a huge success, as no erosion damage was present after the storms. A raised planter was also created as a biofilter to provide all of the parking garage rooftop rainwater.
The Pierre team completed the project by installing 100 trees, over 300 Iceberg roses, more than 1,000 theme-oriented plants, 8,000 ornamental grasses, and over 7,000 ground cover plants. The landscape provided by Pierre included complex brick patterns, decomposed granite, olive groves, stone pines, rose gardens, and hedges.
The Result:
The Long Beach City College now includes a 100 % solar powered parking structure and a “campus green mall.”
With changes made, the once asphalt parking lot that added 40 degrees of heat to the landscape is now expected to reduce temperatures by more than 30 degrees. The installed turf and landscape provided by Pierre will cool the environment, filter the air and water pollutants, and remove carbon dioxide while releasing oxygen for all of the students studying near by.
