Faces of the Diversion: Mark Buringa

Mark Buringa: [00:00:14] My name is Mark Buringa. I’m a contracting officer’s representative for the United States Army Corps of Engineers. I’m the main liaison between the government and the contractor, so I’m the first line of communication between the contractor performing the work and the US government.

[00:00:32] The southern embankment is mostly an earth dam embankment that’s built out of impervious clay material. It holds all the water back south of Fargo before it hits that diversion channel. There’s multiple contract reaches; the one that I work most closely with is the reach SE2B, that’s the one that connects the Wild Rice River Structure and the SE2A structure.

[00:00:58] Earthwork operation seems fairly simple to the untrained eye, but there’s so much going on. Blending process is something that’s really important. You need to make sure that the right suitable material is getting pulled from the borrow and placed in the embankment. That’s known to us as impervious fill, and that fill has to get conditioned to certain moisture and compaction requirements to meet the specifications of a dam embankment.

[00:01:21] Being able to meet those specifications includes operations like conditioning the soil. This would be using agriculture equipment like a disc to be able to make sure that the soil is being blended and the particles are broken down to create a good bonding when it’s placed on the structure itself. Heavy equipment such as sheep’s foot rollers, pull behind tampers, excavators, dozers, all get used in tandem to be able to create a nice cohesive final product that’s going to be very stable to protect the floods of the future.

[00:01:54] This partnership being the first ever that the Corps of Engineers has done, it’s really pushed innovation to be able to solve problems a lot faster. Being able to obligate federal funds in a quick manner is not an easy thing to do. It takes a lot of people working and pulling the rope in the same direction. The administration in this area has done a fantastic job in getting the funds needed for the Corps to be able to execute and do their jobs in a fast manner. And this has really challenged us to be able to push out designs and solutions to problems as we’re experiencing them in the field to be able to meet the overall project deadline and maintain schedule and budget.

[00:02:33] I grew up in southeastern Minnesota and have some experience in the past of flooding in the Driftless region. There’s the Mississippi River Valley, the Root River, the Whitewater River, and all of them have flood potential. In particular, I was a young kid in 2007 and we had a record flood in southeastern Minnesota where the Root River and the Mississippi River came to record levels. It was all hands on deck to try to be able to pump water out of basements and build sandbags and temporary levees to keep the flood waters out of residential areas.

[00:03:19] I’d say the biggest reward to working on this project is the idea that it gets to impact so many people and the local community. It’s a big scale project, one of the biggest ones in the country right now, and it’s an honor just to play a part in that. I look forward to someday bringing my wife and kids and maybe even grandkids out here to a flood protection project that I was able to play a part in building.