Making room

New Morgan County prison rises from Tennessee hills

By Candy McCampbell

Construction of the Morgan County Correctional Complex requires that the contractor move part of a mountain, relocate a creek where 20 buildings will sit and build a tunnel without digging a hole.

A sewage holding tank that will pretreat wastewater from the prison is also on the checklist for Bell and Associates Construction LP, formerly Ray Bell Construction Co., of Brentwood, Tenn., the general contractor.

This three-year, $151 million job, near Wartburg, Tenn., is the largest contract ever let by the state of Tennessee. Bell will build 20 buildings, totaling 500,000 sq ft, and renovate two others, totaling almost 50,000 sq ft.

The new prison is a replacement for and expansion of Brushy Mountain State Prison in nearby Petros. It will have 1,430 maximum-, medium- and minimum-security beds.

The administration building, outside the security perimeter, will be connected with the visitation building, which is inside the perimeter, by a tunnel, says Kevin Keller, project manager with Bell & Associates.

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"The tunnel will be poured on the ground like a box culvert," Keller says. "It is divided in two, one side for visitors and one side for staff."

At 375 ft long, the tunnel will be tied into the buildings on each end. The slab is 13 in deep, the roof 12 in and walls 14 in. It will stand 8 ft. high.

It is transformed from an enclosed hallway to a tunnel when it is buried under 5 ft of dirt. Guards who patrol the fence exterior then can drive over it as they make their rounds.

Much of the sloping site has been farmland, some of it bottom land near a creek, which is now protected by a silt fence, Keller says. Another creek, running where the medium-security housing building and the administration building will sit, has been relocated.

First came a holding pond to keep sediment from the main creek. Then Blalock & Sons Inc. of Sevierville, Tenn., dug a new channel, "like a big U" with a smaller snake-like cut running along the bottom, Keller says.

Workers buried old tree trunks and roots in the banks to create weirs in the new creek.

A pair of temporary lakes created by site grading will be removed as construction ends, Keller says.

Installing the drainage system means laying about 19,000 ft of pipe, most of it 24-in reinforced concrete pipe, he says.

The prison, which is adjacent to an existing regional prison, will get water from the local Plateau Utility District, which recently completed a $2.7 million plant expansion to 2.4 million gallons a day.

That expansion included laying 16-in-diameter ductile iron pipe from the water plant along the highway to the prison turnoff and 8,400 ft of 12-in-diameter ductile iron pipe running in conjunction with existing 6-in PVC line to the prison, says Mike Monroe, general manager.

Wastewater will be pumped to the city plant, which recently tripled capacity to 750,000 gallons, in a $4 million project to accommodate local growth and in anticipation of the new prison, says Cheryl Collins, city recorder.

The prison has five individual pump stations, 6 ft round and about 20 ft deep, that serve as holding basins. They will move wastewater onto the next station, eventually reaching the 20-ft-wide holding tank. There, misters and aerators will pretreat the wastewater and pump it to the city in a continuous flow.

Another underground system is the series of duct banks, concrete-encased conduits that will house all the electric power, communications, fiber optics, telephone and security signaling wiring, Keller says.

Dirt and rock for fill and site leveling has been blasted and hauled from state-owned property across Flat Fork Road that borders the site.

Blalock & Sons brought in four 40-ton trucks to move the 360,000 cu yds of rock and the 600,000-700,000 cu yds of dirt, says Allen Blalock, vice president.

Daily loads are about 3,500 cu yds of rock and 8,000 cu yds of dirt, he says. The buildings, all on self-supporting slabs, will sit on 3 ft of choker stone and 7 ft of dirt, Keller says.

The slabs are 6 in or 8 in thick, reinforced with No. 9 rebar connected to the H-pile foundations. The 45-ft. H-piles, driven about 30 ft deep, are placed about every 14 ft, "sometimes more, depending on where (load) bearing walls are," Keller says.

The 10- by 10-in piles are capped with cast steel tips that become "the sacrificial element that takes the blow," taking the shock when the pile driver hits rock, says Ron Waudby Jr., district sales manager or Skyline Steel LLC of Birmingham, the supplier.

About 2,250 piles, or 48,000 lin ft of steel, are going in the buildings.

The purpose of some buildings determined their place in the construction schedule.

The buildings, which include seven housing units, are mostly precast concrete walls on the big slabs. Two are metal structures.

The cell units, made by Tindall Corp. in Conley, Ga., are precast, insulated, painted and furnished. They are trucked in and set in place. A crane lifts and lowers them around central triangular chases that have all the plumbing and power connection points ready.