Super Excavators Inc.

Super Excavators Inc. is a heavy civil and tunneling contractor based in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin. Ray Schraufnagel and Roy Lemke started it as a plumbing business in 1950, and it moved into deeper open-cut utility work as metro Milwaukee grew. By the 1970s and 1980s, crews were hand mining and running small tunnel boring machines, and the firm landed its first large tunneling job in Kenosha in the early 1990s. Today it handles TBM tunnels up to 23 feet in diameter, microtunneling, foundations, open-cut utilities, pipe bursting and slip lining across the U.S. and Canada. Super is Granite Construction’s joint venture partner on Cleveland’s $324.8 million Big Creek Tunnel, the last storage tunnel in the sewer district’s Project Clean Lake.

Capability, in numbers

Tunnelling at Super Excavators spans 4-foot to 23-foot diameter bores. Microtunnelling runs smaller and tighter, from 24 to 85 inches, and the company states it has driven those through ground ranging from wet sands and silts up to cobbles, boulders and solid bedrock. Lining methods vary with the job: jacking pipe, pre-cast segmental lining, ribs and lagging, or reinforced concrete pipe grouted in place. Grading work uses GPS machine control.

The company is a union employer and a signatory to multiple unions nationwide, which shapes how it staffs out-of-state work. It also carries a broad set of association memberships: the National Utility Contractors Association, the Wisconsin Underground Contractors Association, the Society of Mining Engineers, the American Society of Civil Engineers, the Ohio Contractors Association and the North American Microtunneling Association.

Two offices support that geography. The Wisconsin base is at N59 W14601 Bobolink Ave. in Menomonee Falls, and a Canadian office sits at 734 Nebo Road in Hannon, Ontario. The company says it has built tunnels across the entire United States, from San Francisco to Delaware and Miami to Chicago, and expansion beyond Wisconsin began with work in Albuquerque, New Mexico under Bob Schraufnagel.

Three affiliates extend the range: Super Western Inc., doing civil construction since 1998, CRS Tunneling, and SX Blasting. For an owner, that matters when a single contract needs tunnelling, surface civil work and rock excavation under one umbrella.

Recent named projects give a sense of the current work mix: the Cottonwood and Hackberry Creek Wastewater Interceptor Improvements, the Reedy River Basin Sewer Tunnel, the Blacksnake Creek Stormwater Separation Improvement Project, and the South Interceptor Forcemain North Segment with its companion North Gravity Sewer. Alongside sanitary, storm and water main work, the company also lists roadway and parking lot construction, river re-alignment and shoreline restoration.