RW Armstrong was selected by A2SO4 Architecture, LLC to lead the water resource management utility master planning for a travel plaza in Nigeria.  The travel plaza is to be built in Ilorin, Nigeria beginning in the spring of 2009.  Due to the remote location, water, waste, and energy infrastructures are non-existent.  Additionally, the Nigerian government preferred to employ renewable energy sources to reduce impact on the environment.

The Ilorin travel plaza is situated on 225 acres (91 hectors), will employ between 300 and 400 people and has estimates of 30,000 visitors per day.  The site will contain three separated convenience centers (trucker villages) that will serve up 4000 professional semi-truck drivers.  These facilities are provided exclusively for truck drivers on a fee basis. The trucker villages will provide restaurants, 18 bays of truck washing facilities, showers and recreational areas for the drivers. 

The remainder of the site will be for the general public traveling along the adjacent highway.  It will contain restaurants, a police station, a fire station, medical facilities, a hotel, two diesel truck filling stations, two automotive filling stations, an automotive repair center, a bank, retail shops, entertainment and recreational facilities.

Water resource management was divided into four systems for the site: Potable water, Grey/Non-potable water, Stormwater Management and Sanitary Waste disposal.

·         Potable Water System – This system was designed as a low pressure system that draws fresh water from wells.  The water was then treated and distributed throughout the site.  A holding tank was sized to provide a minimum pressure through the site at 20 psi (1 Bar).

·         Grey/Non-potable Water - This site, because of its various land uses, had a very high demand for water.  In order to minimize the depletion of potable water sources, storm water and effluent from sanitary waste disposal were designed to be retained on site and re-used in some of the higher demand areas.  The truck washes on this site will utilize mechanical water recycling systems that will be supplemented with the on–site recycled water.

·                   Stormwater Management - The location of this site is in the sub-Sahara Africa.  This environment required us to design for very arid periods as well as during rainy seasons.  Stormwater run off was filtered through the use of bio-retention basins and mechanical oil water separators.  This water is then stored on site as water features for later re-use.

·         Sanitary Waste Disposal - The sanitary waste from this site was designed to be collected in a gravity system.  During collection it is routed to centralized septic tanks. From these tanks it is pumped into engineered wetlands where the waste is treated though natural biological processes.  The effluent from these wetlands is then collected, treated and stored on site for re-use in the grey/non-potable water system.