Constant change
Alabama projects are departures from the ordinary

By Sandra Bearden

If there's anything constant in military construction, it's change.

Three contractors with a lot of experience building military projects have re-discovered that truth on some diverse Alabama jobs at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery and Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville.

A five-story, $12 million Squadron Officers' College dormitory under construction at Maxwell will have an exterior of stucco-like material and red tile roof that is similar to the Mediterranean style of the other dorms at the base. Other exterior designs will resemble many half-century old structures on the base.

But don't be fooled.

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"This is the first dorm built with a mixture of reinforced concrete and structural steel," said Glenn Pinson, project superintendent for Bear Brothers Inc. of Montgomery, the general contractor on the project. "All previous buildings have been completely poured-in-place concrete, having columns all the way up with slabs and no metal decking. The only steel was reinforcing steel.

"In this building, we had to pour elevator shafts up to the fifth floor before we could anchor the steel."

Pinson said the most important part of the new approach is getting concrete towers poured fast enough. The contractor called on H & L Concrete Pumping of Troy, Ala., which uses powerful concrete pumps and hydraulic booms. Workers feed concrete into the walls via a giant hose, pouring enough concrete for each floor in two or three hours.

"It takes longer to build our scaffolds than to pour the concrete," Pinson said.

The contractor will use 3,400 cu. yds. of concrete, 573 tons of structural steel and 110 tons of reinforcing steel by the time workers complete the job in July.

The result is an exceptionally strong structure.

Designers have made numerous additional alterations from previous plans, including substituting microwaves for stovetop cooking units and eliminating landscaping around buildings to improve security.

"This is also the first time we've used a computerized quality control system to monitor a job," Pinson said. "We transmit status reports on all phases of the project via the Internet to our office, which forwards them to the Corps of Engineers office in Mobile. In addition to job status, we log in information on weather, number of people working on the job, equipment being used, safety violations or pay requests.

"It's a good tool for us and our subcontractors as well as for the corps."

The dorms are also designed for durability. A sand-colored exterior insulated finish system, which covers all but the lower floors of the dormitory, has layers of gypboard, foamboard, a troweled cement mixture, fiberglass mesh and a colored finish.

"This effectively insulates the building from the outside," Pinson said. Another durable feature is a self-repairing ice-water shield covering the roof decking. If punctured, heat will cause it to re-seal.

In addition, the red concrete tiles, anchored to wood strips placed over the shield, "should last my lifetime," Pinson added.

At Redstone Arsenel, GSC Construction of Waynesboro, Ga. recently finished work on a military project that has more obvious differences.

Don Reeves, project superintendent, directed a $23 million major expansion of the Hazardous Devices School that included construction of a mock "village."

The school, funded and administered by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and run by the Army, trains technicians for all U. S. civilian public safety agencies that have bomb squads. FBI Special Agent Ann Todd said more than 7,000 bomb technicians have attended the school and about 1,200 students go through training annually.

Three major buildings on the 300-acre complex include a two-story administration building, an operations building and an instructors' building, all totaling 75,000 sq. ft.

GSC used 3-ft.-wide footings, slabs, precast concrete walls and structural steel supporting frames and standing-seam metal roofs on the campus buildings. Large commercial HVAC units provide electric heat and air conditioning.

Reeves said the most distinctive construction feature is the administration building auditorium, which has a special plywood-type ceiling with 2- and 4-ft. boxes hanging in different configurations from the ceiling.

"The architect (Mason and Hanger of Lexington, Ky.) put those in for decoration, not acoustics," he added.

While the three major buildings may resemble those on an ordinary community college campus, the accompanying mock village is distinctive. To provide a realistic environment for bomb disposal technicians, GSC cut roads and constructed 25 buildings in 14 different test areas.

The urban-municipal village features a school, fire station, medical clinic and municipal building. One area even has a train station, complete with old railroad cars.

"They place fake bombs inside those buildings and have students locate and dispose of them," Reeves said. "Instead of live bombs, they use a disrupter, which is a modified 12-gauge shotgun. Because of blasts from the disrupter, the first 4 ft. of each building is 1.5-ft.-thick structural concrete. From there, we used concrete blocks for the rest of the walls and truss-type roofs having either shingles or tin roofing."

Locke McKnight, project manager in GSC's home office, said the firm's biggest construction challenge was the concrete walls.

"To deflect the blasts from disrupters, walls had to be on 45-degree cambered angles," McKnight added. "We couldn't patch them. If we made a mistake in building a wall, we tore it out and rebuilt it."

All buildings are miniature versions of what they represent, ranging from a daycare center to a barn. They have electricity and heat, but no air conditioning. Heating systems mainly protect interior finishes in cold weather, Reeves said.

And while visitors may see a toilet, sink, ATM machine or other appropriate plumbing or equipment, none of it works.

The total project required 375 tons of structural steel and 4,200 cu. yds. of concrete. Builders used some of the concrete in odd places - for tables and counters in the village bank, for instance.

"It was strange - and certainly different - to build a community that no one will ever live in, with so much of it concrete," McKnight said.

Change is the main feature hallmark of another Redstone project, a two-phase, complete replacement of the energy distribution system serving the arsenal's Army and National Aeronautics and Space Administration facilities.

M & D Mechanical of Decatur, Ala., handled both phases of the job. Phase two is scheduled for completion in the spring.

"The arsenal covers a huge area, some 15 mi. in each direction," said Nick Vance, M & D's estimator/project manager. "To provide heat, the government built steam distribution systems carried by pipe all over the arsenal. Some was above ground, some below ground. Several remote locations have their own boiler houses."

Vance said the government originally used coal-fired boilers to generate steam, converting to gas in the 1970s. Since the 1980s, boilers have generated steam via a garbage-burning incinerator operated by nearby Huntsville to handle waste disposal.

"But the old piping wasn't doing an efficient job," Vance said. "For every pound of steam generated at the garbage plant, 80 percent was lost. Most of this loss was in old, rotten underground and above-ground piping systems affected by chemicals, corrosion and time. Our goal was to get a return of about 60 or 70 percent, instead of 20 percent."

It's not surprising that some of the old underground pipe was going bad.

"I remember my father installing the system in the 1950s," said Vance, who was M & D's CEO before semi-retiring.

In the second, most recent phase of the project, M & D has installed 27,000 linear ft. of underground conduit and 50,000 linear ft. of aboveground conduit. The conduit system includes carrier pipe covered by insulation, then a 1-in. air space and a layer of heavy steel casing. To curtail corrosion, an epoxy material coats the casing.

While change and variety are the common denominator for the military projects, the contractors are not bothered.

"One thing I like about military work is that you don't do the same thing twice," Reeves said.