Gotta be Tough in Tucson

Where the Casino del Sol sidewalk ends, a row of bollards defines both sides of the road. During heavy periods of rain in Tucson, which occur between July and September, this road floods, despite there being a channel running under the road. Note: You can see the position of that channel by the flood barriers on either side of the road. The specifier knew the bollards at times would be partially submerged, so the iron bollards (R-7572 model, Reliance Foundry), which are coated with a one part epoxy primer and then finished with a polyester, semi-gloss powder-coating, received an additional layer of epoxy primer to the interior of the bollard to further protect the bollards from rusting.
Reliance Foundry

You probably take the toughness of iron bollards for granted, but these stoic sentinels have to stand there, anthropomorphically speaking, day and night, day after day, month after month, year after year and still look as good as the day they were installed.

Take, for example, those rows of bollards bordering the road where the sidewalk ends at the Casino del Sol resort on the Pascua Yaqui Indian Reservation, 15 miles southwest of Tucson, Ariz.

Back in November of 2009 when the Pascua Yaqui Tribal Council began construction of the Casino del Sol resort, Kimley Horn and Associates, a Tucson area design consulting firm, was contracted to design the project; Aqua Design International of Tucson was placed in charge of the pool/water features.

Specifying site amenities is always an important part of any project. When it came to installing fencing and bollards for the area surrounding the casino, Kimley Horn hired the Hunter Guard Rail & Fence Inc., and employed Reliance Foundry to supply the bollards.

In a city, sidewalks are mated to streets wherever there are businesses and homes, but in the Southwest desert with all those vast empty spaces, when you leave a development, at some point the sidewalk ends and the road continues on its solitary way, particularly at the point where a flood plain crosses the road. So, you put up a few floodgates on the side of the road to catch larger pieces of debris when the road floods, but what else?

''I believe this was the first time this was asked of our bollards,'' says Reliance Foundry Product Manager Len Cranmore. ''Surrounding any metal product with water can pose severe threats to its structural integrity and the extreme heat at other times would not help,'' he adds.

He reports no signs of surface damage nor structural damage to the bollards after they experienced two ''monsoon seasons'' in which water often surrounded the bollards.

The anti-corrosive protection to the interior and exterior of the bollards, he notes, is the same primer used to coat the inside of pipes that carry drinking water.