Aimee Lopez

Cromwell Field won’t look any different when it reopens in March 2005 for the Trojan Invitational Track Meet, but what lies beneath the green carpet of newly planted grass will be brand new, and cool.

 Ask Aimee Lopez, BSCE '99 and Turner Construction project manager for a new 3-million gallon water storage tank built 40 feet below the field. The new thermal energy storage (TES) system brought her back to USC five years after her own graduation and has given her an opportunity to “thank USC” for her undergraduate education and very successful career.

 "This is my mark on the world," said the quick-spoken, petite Latina woman, beaming like a mother with her newborn child. "This is the culmination of all my education and training in engineering, something that will last forever and reflects the latest techniques in civil engineering. It's a landmark and I'm very happy that I was able to work on the project."

 Unbeknownst to spectators in the 3,000-seat stadium, or to the athletes racing across its eight, 42-inch Rekortan surfaced lanes, the invisible water storage tank will be doing its thing: circulating chilled water to all of the air conditioning systems on campus, said Richard Snouffer, director of Energy Services in USC’s Facilities Management Office. TES is expected to save USC about 4,500 megawatt-hours of electricity a year and roughly $400,000 annually in electricity costs.

 “Once this tank is buried, we never want to see it again,” Snouffer said.

 “This tank is designed to last forever,” Lopez added.

Measuring 123 feet in diameter and extending 40 feet underground, TES incorporates the latest construction materials and state-of-the-art design for water storage tanks. It was built with 2,310 cubic yards of pre-stressed concrete and 484,000 pounds of steel reinforcements to safeguard it from cracks or damage incurred during an earthquake.

 “The cold water will be circulated day and night to air conditioning systems all over campus, and used in some of the new buildings, such as Tutor Hall and the new Molecular Biology building,” Snouffer said. “The project actually expands the capacity of the campus’s existing chilled water system and reduces our utility costs in the long run.”

 Two projects in one
 TES consists of two components, according to Lopez: the chilled water storage tank under Cromwell Field and a new pump house in the basement of Grace Ford Salvatori Hall. Construction workers had to tunnel 17 feet underground to connect two 24-inch-diameter pipelines from the water tank to the pump house.

“The warmer water coming back through these pipes will have a chance to chill overnight before it is recirculated,” Snouffer explained. “That allows us to shift a lot of our kilowatt-hour usage to off-peak hours – at night – when electricity is less expensive. That’s the beauty of the system.”

The hole that Aimee Lopez dug under Cromwell Field will eventually hold 3 million gallons of water and save USC $400,000 annually in electricity costs.

Sensors suspended in the tank will monitor water temperature and height. A computer energy control management system will alert facilities personnel if anything goes awry.

“It would cost more than a million dollars to replace that track,” Snouffer said. “The bridge, which is about 4 feet above the track, turned out to be the most viable way of protecting it.”

Lopez isn’t new to construction — she grew up with it. Her father, a migrant worker, built apartments in the small agricultural community of Huron, Calif., about 100 miles southwest of Fresno, when he wasn’t working in the fields.

 “Since I was very small, I always wanted to be a builder of some type,” she said. “At first, I was interested in architecture, but then, seeing my dad building apartments got me interested in construction. So I told him that one day I wanted to build the apartments for him. I wanted to make his dream come true.”

 Lopez liked science and math. In middle school, she was selected to enter an advanced summer school program – the Coalinga-Huron House for the Academically Talented Development Program -- for children gifted in math and science. She spent six summers on the UC Berkeley campus, taking college-level advanced placement courses. She applied to a variety of college engineering schools, including “some of the state schools, Cal Polytechnic University in San Luis Obispo, UCLA, Berkeley and some of the other UC campuses up north.” Then she attended a MESA (Mathematics, Engineering, Science Association) college orientation program, where she met Larry Lim, director of pre-college programs in the Viterbi School of Engineering, and clenched the deal.

She entered the USC civil engineering program in 1994 and moved into Fluor Tower, a campus dorm. Each floor of the dorm had a different cultural theme; Lopez lived on a Latino floor and wanted to create an extended family environment. She got involved with the Latino student assembly and co-founded a Latina sorority, Nuestra Alma Latina, which means “our Latin soul,” during her freshman year. “That’s one of the reasons I’m so excited to be back on campus,” she said. “We are celebrating our 10th year this year.”

Lopez attributes much of her success in engineering to USC’s diversity and nurturing environment. “I learned valuable leadership skills at USC and that’s really important for women in this field,” she said. “There aren’t that many women who graduate in engineering and there’s even fewer Latina women. They get lost. So we wanted to help everybody out and let them know that they weren’t alone. We wanted to make everybody a leader.”

 And lead she did, “on two hours of sleep a night,” she laughed. “I still have my class schedules, where I would write in my 15-minute naps between classes. It was non-stop.”

Lopez interned at IBM during her second year at USC. Then Parsons, a large civil engineering firm based in Pasadena, CA, recruited her and she worked nearly full-time while still taking classes. Her natural leadership qualities didn’t go unnoticed; she was awarded an El Centro Chicano Student Leadership award in both her junior and senior years, and was asked to speak at her own USC graduation ceremony in 1999.

 After graduation, Parsons offered Lopez an opportunity to be a field engineer on a construction project at Merck’s, a pharmaceutical company in Elkton, Virginia. She spent three months helping to upgrade some of the company’s facilities.

 Turner Construction, a leader in high-rise construction, caught her attention shortly thereafter and she moved into project management in California. Since joining Turner, she has been a project manager on an Internet-hosting facility in Marina Del Rey and worked on a baggage screening security system upgrade at Los Angeles International Airport.