As part of their Senior Design Capstone course, Civil & Environmental Engineering students provided designs and cost estimates for improvements in Lee County's Chatfield Park Campground. 

Lee County Conservation is in the process of updating their public campgrounds. These updates include adding septic hookups and concrete pads to each campsite. These enhancements improve the park user’s experience in a couple of ways. The first is the septic system removes the need for the user to pull their trailer off a site to go dump their wastewater at a dump station. The concrete pads are large enough to allow a large camper to park and features enough space for a little patio area on each site. This patio creates a nice gathering space for people to set up their lawn chairs and picnic tables. For this project, students designed a septic system for the campground, which can process all the campsites along with a future shower house with restrooms, as well as concrete pads throughout the campground. If the possible, they could also design a new shower house with restrooms.

Sanitary System with Septic Tanks and Leach Field Scope:

The engineering team designed a sanitary collection system for all 20 camp sites with septic tanks and leach fields, and tie in a newly constructed shower-house. These have been properly sized to not only handle the full capacity of the site if full but also comply Iowa Administrative Code (IAC) Chapter 69 for sizing guidelines for all the septic tanks, leach fields, and collection system.

Trail and Culvert Scope:

The Chatfield Campground has asked to see the incorporation of a trail connecting their campgrounds to a nearby lake east of the site. The trail is designed to connect the two areas following the National Parks Services Standards for Trail Construction for Rural Natural Trails. Due to the site and geography of the land the trail is designed to cross a stream that drains the campgrounds towards the lake due east. This trail crosses the stream, via culvert system, without disrupting the stream and in turn the drainage of the campgrounds. This culvert is designed following the Iowa SUDAS.

Shower House / Pavilion Scope:

Design alternatives were explored in order to bring a shower house and rest room to the campground site. The added site includes appropriate plumbing that is part the sanitary system design. The site also has appropriate water main connections along with electricity. The shower-house will serve the campground users as a place to shower and or use the rest room during their campground stay. The engineering team obtained architectural drawings from Romtec Design services to aid this stage of the design process. The architectural drawings along with the engineering team selected design materials and foundations designs were used to meet the client's current needs and for construction price estimation. The foundation design follows the 2015 IBC and the Simplified Design of Foundations book. The Chatfield Campground Upgrades project also includes a pavilion shelter area design using the same tactics of acquiring architectural drawings from Romtec Design services to aid this stage of the design process.

Electric / Water Scope:

Multiple camp sites at the Chatfield Campground currently do not have access to drinking water or electricity. Underground connections building off the existing utility lines were designed to connect these said sites to the utilities they needed.