By: Lane Enterprises, Inc
The Cubes at Inland Woods is a Class A distribution facility located in Duncan, South Carolina – a modern, state-of-the-art facility offering cross-dock loading configuration, 36’ clear heights, 246 dock doors, a 185-foot truck court and 555 spaces of excess trailer parking.
Phase 1 of the 324-acre site includes a 500,280-square-foot speculative warehouse center expandable to 1,186,680-square-feet. The site is adjacent to BMW U.S. Headquarters and in the vicinity Michelin North America. It is five miles from the Greenville-Spartanburg International Airport and four miles from Inland Port Greer, with rail connection to the Port of Charleston.
What you won’t see upon visiting the site is the immense drainage pipe network required to service the impervious area needed for such a development, which will ultimately amount to some 40-acres of rooftop alone.
Historically, South Carolina is a reinforced concrete pipe (RCP) stronghold. However, 2022 supply chain issues coupled with high pipe demands put the RCP industry in disarray. RCP manufacturing is a very slow process by itself – lead times reported for top level customers were three to four months and as high as nine months for other customers.
The misfortunes of the RCP industry spelled opportunity for the corrugated steel pipe (CSP) industry. Many South Carolina specifiers are not familiar with other pipe types, and a risk-averse mindset will not normally entertain alternates where unfamiliarity prevails. Given the supply circumstances, “Who has time to research pipe 
materials?” and “Don’t fix it if it’s not broke” mentalities were abated, and the engineer gave full attention to CSP industry materials, supporting documents, reports, and other research.
In the end the engineer of record recognized structural and hydraulic characteristics matched the original RCP design, but the clincher was service life performance. The aluminized steel (ALT2) spiral rib pipe touts service life in the 75 to 100-yr range, exactly what was expected from RCP.
The real win is not converting RCP to CSP for The Cubes at Inland Woods – the real win is converting the engineer, since that conversion will lead to more CSP conversions.