ORANGE BEACH, Ala. – The canopy is almost complete and the building is in place for a new Murphy Oil station in front of the Walmart Neighborhood Market in Orange Beach.

“It shouldn’t take them too long,” city Community Development Director Kit Alexander said. “The building is prefab.”

Project Manager Frank Mendelson says the biggest part of the job is raising the area for the building to keep water out.

“See how there’s like a valley in the middle?” he asked. “If I put the store in the valley all the groundwater is going to rush in there. I’ve got to build the grade up. The sand, after they strip up all this asphalt, I’m going to spread it out over there because I’ve got to build on top of it.

“I’ve got to raise this ground up about a foot and a half right here in the middle so it’ll throw the water to catch basins we’re going to put around the site.”

Dealing with water in the site on Perdido Beach Boulevard has been a problem, Mendelson said. The first part of the job was digging holes big enough for the gas tanks.

“When you get down to 12 feet there’s some hard stuff down there,” he said. “I had a problem driving through it. There’s groundwater six feet down and I had to do down 15. When we dug the hole you could see the water. Right now it’s only six feet down and you can see the water.”

The new station will offer premium and regular gas and diesel fuel.

“We put two 20,000 gallon tanks in the ground,” Mendelson said. “One is a split tank. It’s going to be 8,000 diesel and 12,000 premium gas. And the 20,000-gallon tank is just regular fuel. The canopy is 24 by 146 feet, that’s what those footers are for right there.”

Now the canopy is complete and just some finishing remains.

“There will be a small little convenience store right in the middle, about a 560-square-foot building you can walk in with a couple of little coolers,” Mendelson said.

Mendelson is originally from Connecticut but now lives in Tampa. Putting in gas stations for his company Delta Aventura, a large construction company that is involved in a variety of construction projects, is his specialty.

“I handle gas stations,” he said. “I’ve been building gas stations for 22 years. That’s all I do.”

Mendelson said the new store ought to be open by July 15.

As part of the contract, Delta Aventura agreed to clean out a corner of a retention pond on the property.

“There’s a lot of trash in it right around that corner there were people have been throwing trash and we told them we’d clean it up,” Mendelson said.