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Cover Story September/October 2009 Marching Orders NGA’s New Campus East employs early contractor involvement on a $1.4-billion design-bid-build project By Bruce Buckley
To deliver the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s massive New Campus East project, contractors, designers and government agencies needed a solid battle plan. When completed in 2011, the $1.4-billion construction job will consolidate operations of six NGA facilities on 98 acres at Fort Belvoir Proving Ground, Va. The centerpiece of the fast-track project, which broke ground in September 2007, is a 2.2-million-sq-ft main office building. Because an overlapping schedule of additional projects at the site added considerable complexities to the job and required large-scale coordination efforts, the team led by a joint venture of Bethesda, Md.-based Clark Construction Group and the Fairfax, Va., office of Balfour Beatty Construction, both members of multiple AGC chapters, had to find efficient ways to keep massive manpower and materials moving. “From the beginning, we recognized this was more of an infrastructure job than a pure construction job,” says Keith Couch, vice president of Clark. Early Involvement For the project to be a success, marching orders needed to be made early. Funded through the Base Realignment and Closure Act of 2005, the project faces a firm September 2011 completion date. To speed delivery, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is leading the project for NGA, turned to an emerging delivery technique for the Corps—early contractor involvement.
Dubbed “integrated design-bid-build,” the contract was advertised when designs created by the team of Baltimore-based RTKL and Philadelphia-based KlingStubbins were at the 15% stage. The Clark/Balfour Beatty team was awarded its contract in August 2007, when plans were at the 35% stage, allowing it to offer significant input on design decisions. Mike Rogers, the Corps of Engineers program manager for the project, estimates the delivery method saved four to six months that would have been required under a traditional method. “The contractors’ knowledge of the marketplace and their ability to contribute value-engineering ideas were important things to have happening earlier and in real time,” Rogers says. Because of the contractor input, precast concrete was added extensively to the design. The original office building called for a glass curtain-wall skin, but in considering cost and availability issues, Clark/Balfour Beatty suggested precast panels fabricated at a nearby facility would be the best option. The 5,000-space parking garage also was redesigned from a cast-in-place concrete structure to a simpler precast design, which Rogers estimates saved between $40 million and $50 million.
Before shovels could hit the ground, extensive environmental cleanup was required. In addition to significant wetlands on the site, crews had to mitigate chemical contaminants and the remnants of past munitions activities carried out at the proving ground. Although the bulk of that work was completed before contractors began moving dirt in February 2008, safety specialists were always on hand, just in case. “They worked in front of us every time we dipped a bucket in a new piece of ground,” says Jim Fredmund, project executive with Balfour Beatty. “It caused a lot of angst, but all turned out uneventful. When they found suspect stuff, they blew it up.” The site also had no utilities, which had to be quickly added to help accommodate the nearly 1,500 workers on the job as well as the staff housed in more than 60,000 sq ft of on-site trailers. More than 2 miles of access roads and nearly 10 miles of underground utilities were added. “Our temporary construction power is the equivalent of subdivision power,” Fredmund says. “It is like we built a small community just for our guys out here.” Location, Location, Location Massive coordination efforts to keep people and materials moving also were an early priority. The site is located adjacent to Interstate 95, near the Capital Beltway that circles the Washington, D.C., metro area—a location that Couch says is both “a blessing and a curse.”
Although I-95 provides a major artery for people and materials, it is notorious for hours of gridlock during peak commuter times. Multiple access points to the site were created and work schedules were planned to fall within the times when traffic flow was low. “We could not have two-hour commutes for our guys,” Couch adds. “No one would have come.” Although the site is large, Couch says the bulk of materials had to be stored offsite and brought in as needed, creating a steady flow of truck traffic. “We could not just bring out 1.5 million sq ft of precast and park it here,” he adds. “We get 10 to 20 pieces brought in per day.” Large concrete pours also have been avoided in favor of smaller ones that range from 250 to 300 cu yd per day. Careful sequencing of the job has kept crews marching forward. The four-level, 150,000-sq-ft Technical Center, which houses the facility’s extensive information technology systems, and the 100,000-sq-ft central utility plant were the first to be designed and built. By delivering these portions first, crews could turn over spaces to contractors hired by NGA to install nearly $1 billion of IT infrastructure. Although the IT contractor, General Dynamics, is not part of the Corps of Engineers build team, it has been included in weekly planning meetings since the start of the project. “There is the real potential for people to be bumping into each other out here,” Rogers says. “Our guys all understand the need to get the mission-critical work into those spaces quickly, and we are working together to make that happen.” That strategy carries over into the main office building. The facility’s two crescent-shaped towers are sequenced as eight vertical core areas that can be delivered to the IT contractors one after another. Leapfrogging Each core has its own elevator bank, rooftop penthouse and electrical distribution. “For each tower, it is like building four 250,000-sq-ft buildings that are adjacent to each other,” Fredmund says. Two crews work in leapfrog fashion. As one crew completes a core, it goes around the adjacent crew to start work on the next one in the sequence.
Before the towers could go up, a 300,000-cu- yd initial pass of earthmoving was required for foundations and the single-story, below-grade basement levels. The entire building foundation was envisioned to be composed of large, rock-bearing spread footings. However, geotechnical testing revealed inconsistent competency of the rock. The design was changed to a mix of spread footers and 30-in.- to 96-in.-wide caissons, most of which were rock-socketed at 5 ft deep. Nearly 23,000 tons of structural steel is being erected for the two towers. This fall, crews began work on the eight-story, football-shaped atrium that will connect the two crescent-shaped towers. The 120-ft span will be covered with a lightweight ETFE membrane roof that allows in natural light. Most famously used as the skin for the Beijing National Aquatics Center featured at the 2008 Summer Olympic Games, the system uses puffed “pillows” of ETFE connected with a web of aluminum ribs. As the building is going up, a separate Virginia Dept. of Transportation project is under way to build a new portion of highway through the site, aimed to help ease the flow of additional commuters created by the NGA move.
Given the level of complexity, information technology has played a heavy role in communication and coordination efforts. The office runs as “nearly paperless,” and plans are available in the main meeting room on a 50-in., high-definition screen. Staff also can dial up plans anywhere on-site via laptops. Building information modeling has also been used extensively to identify systems clashes before they appear in the field. Occupancy of some spaces is expected to start in the spring. Clark/Balfour Beatty plans to finish its work in April 2011, allowing nearly five months for final IT and fit-out work.
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