Good Things Come in Smaller Packages
Military Downsizing Creates a Boomin Base Redevelopment
By Dave Morningstar
Most of us don’t consider “downsizing” a positive word. Whether it appliesto a large corporation, small business, or government agency, the termusually means lost jobs and lost revenues for the affected communities.
That scenario is certainly what happened when the U.S. Department of Defense decided to close a number of military bases under its Base Realignment and Closing (BRAC) program. However, something good also occurred. BRAC had the paradoxical impact of creating a construction boom on many of the remaining facilities. “In fact, there are so many projects out there just now that we’re turning down more than we’re bidding on,” notes Kevin Swain, Operations Manager for Chicago-based Walsh Construction.
Walsh is building a new freight terminal at the Dover Air Force Base in Delaware and a new Brigade Combat Team Complex for the Army at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. “Anytime you’re working for the government, you can expect to see layer upon layer of regulations, specifications, and guidelines for every job aspect. The military takes that to a whole new level,” notes Rich Ross, Project Manager for Parsons Electric LLC. Ross has a great deal of first-hand experience, as he is involved in the Dover project and a project for the Norfolk Naval Station in Virginia, working on a new aircraft maintenance hangar for the helicopter minesweeping squadron HM-14.
Bryce Staudinger, Project Manager for the electrical portion of the Brigade Combat Team Complex at Fort Bragg, echoes Ross’ thought. “Not only did we have all the usual challenges of a fast-track government project,” Staudinger explains, “but we also had to deal with things like live ordnance on the building site. Watching an explosive ordnance disposal team blow up a 50-year-old artillery shell someone found while digging on your jobsite sure makes the day interesting.”
A Complicated Project
A self-contained unit within Fort Bragg, the Brigade Combat Team Complex provides everything necessary to support a 3,250-person rapid deployment force. It includes 735,000 square feet of building space consisting of barracks for 1,500 personnel, company operations facilities, brigade and battalion headquarters, a dining facility, battalion storage buildings, arms vaults, and laundry facilities.
The Fort Bragg site covers roughly 135 acres,and the work included everything from treeharvesting to installation of water and sewersystems, storm drains, gas and electrical utilities,and infrastructure to support severalsophisticated information systems.
“This is the biggest project we’ve done since the base power supply was privatized with the local public utility,” notes Cal Edison, Corps of Engineers Site Resident Engineer. “There was some concern about coordinating them with the on-site contractor. But Parsons handled the issues very professionally, and there were no problems. It went very smoothly.”
The first to occupy the Brigade Combat Team Complex will be soldiers returning from Iraq. “This is a fast-track project, with a schedule that requires design and construction to be complete in 305 days,” Staudinger notes. “We had only a couple of weeks to learn how to use the software the Corps of Engineers specified. With cooperation from the Corps and the other construction team members, the returning troops should be able to move in on schedule.” Staudinger’s counterpart for the technology work is Steve Idso, Project Manager, Parsons Technologies. “Constructing the barracks was a lot like working on a civilian apartment building,” Idso says. “We installed CAT6 and coax plus copper pairs to provide telephone and data service to each room. A combination of copper and fiber for data communications was used to meet the system’s high-security specifications. We installed intrusion alert systems on the arms vaults and the mass notification system for the entire site.”
Mass notification systems are a newly mandated feature for all government installations. Ordered in response to the communication chaos during the 9/11 attacks, these systems provide communication management and access control over all channels installed in government facilities, plus strobes and other attention-getting equipment.
“You might think of it as a public address system on steroids,” says Scott Bergland, Senior Account Manager, Parsons Technologies, who handled the mass notification system for the Dover project. “With some innovative design, we were able to incorporate public address and indoor warning into one supervised system that enhanced the reliability of both systems. It also saved room in the closets and cabinets, which helped make the whole building more space efficient.”
The Same But Different
The Dover Air Freight Terminal is a 900-footlong by 250-foot-wide cargo processing and handling facility with associated office, administration, and Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) spaces. The project incorporates cargo processing areas, a security cage, a Mechanical Material Handling System (MMHS) maintenance shop, a recouperage/ carpenter shop, a mail room, covered storage, enclosed hazardous materials storage, and administrative space.
“Actually, this facility isn’t all that different from the distribution centers we have worked on for Wal-Mart and Target,” says Ross. “Products come in on over-the-road trucks, and they’re unloaded, palletized, and assembled into loads for transport aircraft that deliver them around the world. Of course, at Dover, they’re just as likely to be packaging a Humvee or an artillery piece as they are the kind of things you’d find at Target or Wal-Mart. The principle is the same but a lot more complicated.”
Parsons participated in the Dover Freight Terminal project during the early design phases. As a result, they were able to propose approaches that saved money and space. “We suggested using a product called MaxCell in the conduit,” explains Bergland. MaxCell is a plastic sheath divided into three separate cells with a pull-string pre-installed in each cell, allowing the conduit needs to be reduced by 66 percent.
“By combining the voice, data, and mass notification systems, we reduced the overall space needed for the building’s technology infrastructure to approximately 80 percent of the original plan,” says Bergland.
Some Unusual Requirements
The P-526 Maintenance Hangar project in Norfolk tested the project team’s flexibility and creativity. The project included two buildings: a 54,142-square-foot aircraft maintenance hangar and a 38,890-square-foot Airborne Mine Counter-measures facility to support the helicopter- based mine-sweeping operations.
“While this may sound pretty ordinary, in reality these buildings had some unusual requirements,” says Ross. “For example, aircraft operate on 400Hz, not 60Hz, which is standard for most equipment.We had to install converters at each maintenance station to handle this requirement. We were also challenged with the electrical installation of multiple coiling fabric doors used to secure the large hangar openings. Since the doors were manufactured in Finland, communication between our electricians and the manufacturer was difficult. We created our own installation drawings to ensure that our electricians could easily complete the installation.”
According to John Smeltzer, Quality Control Manager for M.A. Mortenson Company, the prime contractor at Norfolk, the Navy is particular about the quality of electricity going into multimillion-dollar equipment, like a mine-sweeping helicopter. “They went over both systems with the proverbial fine-tooth comb, and both performed flawlessly,” he says. “They were also concerned about the 35 kV connection that was made to power this project. A mistake there could have blacked out most of the base, but it all went smoothly because the splice was handled safely.”
No live artillery rounds were encountered during the construction. “But we had our share of underground surprises, nevertheless,” Ross says. “A lot of site infrastructure was not on any map or drawing, things like live steam lines. Needless to say, we did our fair share of very careful hand excavation.” Learning and Adapting
“You have to learn how the government does things and then adapt your systems to accommodate them,” notes Bergland. With three major military construction projects under its belt and no end to such work in sight, Parsons will use the knowledge gained at Dover, Norfolk, and Fort Bragg to make future projects run even more efficiently.
