Arizona’s Tough Terrain And Poor Soils Challenge Septic System Installers

Sand and boulders, foothills and hardpan valley soils provide plenty of onsite challenges for Arizona’s Hornick Contracting.
Arizona’s Tough Terrain And Poor Soils Challenge Septic System Installers
The Hornick Contracting team includes, from left, Jim Ralls, Faye and John Hornick, Tim and Sheila Bottorff, and brothers J.R. and Justin Bottorff.

In the Arizona desert, Hornick Contracting has made a name and a niche by focusing on a substance more valuable than the gold still hunted by prospectors: water. Now moving into control of a new generation, Hornick’s has survived and thrived through hard work and adapting to fit changing times and customer needs. Nor will that adaptation stop if company manager Tim Bottorff has his way.

Much of the company’s business is driven by Arizona’s geology. When housing was booming, most of Hornick Contracting’s installs were traditional septic systems. Now ATUs dominate because many building sites are located high on hills or mountains where good soil is nonexistent.

DIG IT BY HAND

“There are many challenging ground conditions here in Arizona. We have a lot of granite,” Tim says. There is caliche, thick deposits of calcium carbonate washed into low areas by rainwater. “Some people call it Indian concrete, and it can be extremely difficult to dig.”

How Hornick workers dig depends on the conditions. For an extremely hard dig they rent equipment, typically a backhoe-mounted breaker. “On a lot of these jobs, the hillside is so steep you have to be pretty creative to get a piece of equipment up there,”
Tim says.

Dripline is usually installed by hand. When you hand-dig, the effect on the landscape is minimal, Tim says. Crews can go around trees and cacti without harming them. Vibrating plows won’t work in Hornick’s area because the soil is too rocky. All the rock also means drip trenches are specially constructed. Hornick’s crews dig a foot below grade, make a trench 4 to 6 inches wide, fill that with sand, put in dripline center and cover with native soil. Typically Hornick Contracting installs about 1,100 linear feet of line per job although it has done projects as large as 4,000 feet.

Although systems are designed to use all the wastewater they produce – especially ATUs with drip irrigation to water landscape plants – the sun and dry desert air provide an added benefit by evaporating the treated water. But because the rocky soil can move wastewater quickly, the state of Arizona takes an extra step and requires either chemical or UV disinfection for ATUs in sensitive soils, Tim says.

GETTING STARTED

The company began with John Hornick, Tim’s stepfather, who acquired heavy equipment experience in the Army Corps of Engineers during the Vietnam War. He started the business part time in the 1970s and went full time in 1973 with Hornick Contracting. He installed conventional septic systems for builders in the Phoenix area. Evapotranspiration systems were popular. At that time this meant hammering a hole in rock, filling it with sand and gravel layers, and installing 4-inch perforated pipe to drain effluent from the tank. John remains president and owner but is semiretired.

People who know the company may be confused by Tim’s last name, because he is commonly known as Tim Hornick. Not only does Tim not mind, he welcomes it. John may legally be his stepfather, but in Tim’s mind he is so much more, and has taught Tim so much, that calling John father is more appropriate. And if there’s a decision or an idea about the company, Tim talks it over with his dad first.

When he left the Air Force in 1995 and went to work in the business, Tim developed an interest in advanced treatment. He had been an Air Force welder and machinist working on fighter aircraft. He sought training by one ATU manufacturer, then another, and it continued. Now, Tim says, the company is either a dealer or certified installer for all major ATU systems on the market. There are subtle differences in each technology, and Tim believes completing a proper installation requires knowledge about all of them.

With the shifting housing market and increasingly restrictive regulations, Hornick Contracting’s business has changed. Once the company installed about 80 percent conventional systems on large housing developments. ATUs are now 90 percent of the work, and 90 to 95 percent of the projects are large custom homes. The other 5 to 10 percent are commercial installations such as golf courses, the Phoenix International Raceway, police training facilities and truck stop gas stations.

The company currently consists of Tim; his wife, Sheila, who handles the office, phones, billing and conventional septic system design and permitting; his brother-in-law, Jim Ralls, who is heavy-equipment operator, driver, maintenance supervisor, maintenance technician and electrician; and his oldest son, Steven, heavy-equipment maintainer and operator, and maintenance technician assistant.

TOOLS OF THE TRADE

Hornick Contracting may do a lot, but it doesn’t take a great deal of equipment to make the business go. 

There are two Caterpillar backhoes, a 426 and a 416, and a Cat mini-excavator. The company dump truck started as a 1996 International chassis. The Hornick crew rebuilt the engine and had a dump box installed. It doesn’t accumulate many miles because it is used only for hauling equipment and excess soil. The service truck is a 2006 Dodge diesel four-wheel drive. Hornick Contracting also runs a 1996 Ford pickup and a 2002
Dodge diesel.

Another piece of equipment much smaller but no less useful is Tim’s Panasonic Toughbook. You will find the same model laptop in many police cars and for the same reason. Tim bought his so he has a working computer when he needs one. “The sun in Arizona is intense, especially when the truck is closed up. Standard laptops can’t take the heat. I burned through a bunch of them and finally gave up and bought the Toughbook. It was $3,000, slightly more than twice the price of a regular laptop, but I’ve had it for two years, and it’s still working.”

The laptop enables him to put his office in the truck. He tried a tablet computer, but it didn’t have enough power or flexibility. With the computer tethered to the Internet through his smartphone, he can go online from anywhere there’s a cell signal and handle billing or emails.

NETWORKING FOR SUCCESS

The reason for the spartan equipment list is the relationships Tim has built with other contractors in his area. He is not in business to put other people out of business. Instead he has cultivated a specialty and takes advantage of other people who have done the same.

“We had a pump truck at one time, but we found it was better to hire out the pumping. We didn’t have to maintain or insure a pump truck, and we would get references for repair work from the pumping companies we use. This way it’s more profitable. Everyone has work, everyone helps and everyone wins,” Tim says.

Effective business networking is not a new goal. It’s the attitude Tim’s stepfather started the company with. 

“When you’re dealing with customers, you make an impression by doing a good job. If you do that job very well, when the customer’s neighbor needs some work done, your name comes up,” Tim says. “If they build another house or if a friend builds a house, we get the word-of-mouth recommendation: ‘They took care of us and charged us a fair price.’ It makes me smile when I hear that on the other end of the phone.”

The same is true for the company’s commercial work. Three or four builders in the area will only use Hornick Contracting. These are also multi-generation businesses whose families have known the Hornick business
for years.

MORE PARTNERSHIPS PLANNED

Tim is thinking about where the company can go next. For some time he has been considering household water storage and pressure systems. The Arizona geology that makes it difficult to install wastewater systems has the same effect on water supplies for customers. “Our water table is deep. The areas where our customers build custom homes have almost no water. Their wells have to be around 4,000 feet,” he says.

The solution is to haul water in. A home will have a storage tank of a couple thousand gallons. A jet pump pulls water from it to a pressurized holding tank with a bladder to feed the household piping. That’s expensive, but it’s cheaper than drilling a 4,000-foot well, Tim says. Also reducing the expense for homeowners is the lack of continuous occupancy. Many homes are built for retirees from up north – or snowbirds – and as a result water usage is not heavy.

Hornick Contracting already installs and maintains the storage and pressure tanks and pumps for household systems, and Tim would like to expand his service to providing a well where it is feasible and cost-effective. The plan is to partner with qualified well-drilling companies for that work, and he would take care of the rest of the infrastructure: pipes, pumps and tanks.

GOING FOR GROWTH

In one respect, Hornick Contracting looks like it’s in a vulnerable place. Like other cities of the South and West, Phoenix is growing. In February 2014, it ranked third in the nation in population growth. With that always comes the threat of municipal sewer.

“I’m not threatened by sewer services to subdivisions. That has always happened, and we have always been able to find enough work,” Tim says. “Outside of the city there are many areas where people want a house in the suburbs, and they must have an onsite wastewater system. If municipal sewer comes past your property, the city will force you to hook up when your onsite system fails, and I have done that for people, too.”

Again, geology works in Hornick’s favor. Mountains and ridges separate people from municipal pipes. But the company has a more powerful advantage: a long-standing reputation for excellent service combined with a willingness to explore and harness new opportunities. These make the dry desert a productive place for Hornick Contracting, a family business in every sense of the term. 



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