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An elephant on the run is a force to be reckoned with.

鈥淚t depends on how much room they have to gather speed, but it’s in the ballpark of 30,000 pounds, so about twice their weight,鈥� said聽Ed Quesenberry, principal of LLC in Lake Oswego, of the impact force a charging elephant can inflict. 鈥淚t’s pretty significant.鈥�

The Oregon Zoo recently awarded Equilibrium the structural design contract for a new elephant habitat. The $40 million project is coming out of a $125 million bond the state passed in 2008 and will increase the current pachyderm property from 1.5 acres to six. It will involve construction of a new elephant management building, an indoor viewing hall and a life support system facility.

To put in perspective 30,000 pounds of force, a runaway car’s impact load is just 6,000 pounds of pressure, Quesenberry said. So the elephant facility needs to be pretty beefy.

鈥淭ension cable fencing with big foundations because the elephants like to push on them and pull on them and step on them,鈥� he said. 鈥淪o that will be a good design problem for us to deal with.鈥�

SRG Partnership’s Hussain Mirza is the principal architect heading the project. He said the firm has worked with Equilibrium in the past.

鈥淗e’s a very creative engineer,鈥� Mirza said of Quesenberry. 鈥淚t’s an unusual project and it requires a lot of thinking outside the box and he can certainly do that. So we appreciate the rigor he brings to it.鈥�

Quesenberry said the elephant facility is a bit of a departure from the firm’s typical repertoire of health care, higher education, institutional, mixed-use and parking structures.

鈥淭his kind of zoo project doesn’t come along very often,鈥� he said.

The structural engineering package also includes relocation of the zoo’s train tracks and the design of two train trestles. Quesenberry said the firm has already begun design of the new train system and a new service road, which should be ironed out in the next eight months. Those two projects will be the first to go out to bid for construction, he said.

The company hopes to finish design of the elephant habitat by the first half of 2013, and Quesenberry said construction should begin in the second half of next year. For now, Equilibrium will be doing a lot of number crunching.

鈥淭here’s a lot of design considerations that we have to take into account that are different from a normal building for obvious reasons,鈥� he said. 鈥淵ou’re dealing with a seven-and-a-half-ton animal that can deliver a lot of load on the walls and floors.鈥�