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Portland Water Bureau chief engineer Michael Stuhr long knew it would be catastrophic to continue to house maintenance crews and supplies for the city鈥檚 drinking water system in a 90-year-old building that would likely collapse in a major earthquake.

For more than a decade, he advocated for a $50 million project to construct a new seismically sound warehouse and maintenance building for the Water Bureau off of North Interstate Avenue.

鈥淚 was schooled in California and seismic things bother me a lot,鈥� he said. 鈥淪tarting 12 years ago, I started pushing for it. I dragged every mayor and Water Bureau commissioner through here.鈥�

Four years ago, Stuhr saw those efforts pay off when the Portland City Council approved plans to replace the bureau鈥檚 Interstate Operations and Maintenance Center. Hoffman Construction Co. 听crews in the fall 2012 broke ground on the project, designed by MWA Architects. Remaining construction on the site, near the intersection of North Interstate Avenue and North Tillamook Street, is expected to wrap up by February 2016.

Stuhr this week proudly showed off the completed 44,000-square-foot maintenance office building where approximately 320 Water Bureau staffers moved in May and an adjacent 30,500-square-foot warehouse that stores tools, equipment and supplies for water system repairs and construction. Nearby, demolition crews were in the midst of tearing down the 1925 building that he pushed to replace with the new structures, which are expected to meet Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design gold standards.

The new buildings are a vast improvement over the aging former parking garage the structures replaced, said Walt Lewandowski, a Water Bureau senior engineer and construction manager for the project. The 1925 building, which the city acquired in the 1930s, was never designed to hold offices and suffered from a series of maintenance issues, including deteriorating and inadequate electrical and mechanical systems, he said.

Like the Emergency Coordination Center, a joint Water Bureau and Bureau of Emergency Management project in Southeast Portland completed in late 2013, city officials consider the new Water Bureau maintenance offices and warehouse essential structures. The two new buildings were designed to withstand a high-magnitude earthquake so city crews would be able to quickly respond and repair damage to the water system following a disaster.

鈥淎fter the 鈥榖ig one鈥� this thing will be standing,鈥� Stuhr said. 鈥淲e have $2 million of inventory at any one time 鈥� We need all this stuff to do all our repair work, so it鈥檚 in a safe place.鈥�

The maintenance and operations center buildings are heavily reinforced to ensure the concrete and steel structures would survive an earthquake intact, Stuhr said. This included installing concrete shear walls to absorb the seismic load and using piles that extend 80 to 90 feet underground to bolt the foundations to solid rock. In the warehouse building, large steel braces will provide further protection from the force of an earthquake. Racks holding maintenance supplies are also bolted down and reinforced so they won鈥檛 collapse.

The project incorporated numerous sustainable design features, including a solar-heated water system, solar electricity and an eco-roof. The visitor parking lot uses impervious concrete, and all stormwater runoff is managed on site through a series of bioswales.

Many of the materials from the former maintenance building that is being torn down will be reused or recycled, Stuhr said. The old building is scheduled to be fully demolished in the next few weeks and replaced with a parking lot for Water Bureau vehicles, Lewandowski said.

If funding allows, the last piece of the project could involve constructing a small metal-frame building for storing Water Bureau concrete trucks and a tour bus used for trips to the Bull Run watershed, Stuhr said.

Along with seismic resiliency and energy efficiency, another consideration in the design process for the new maintenance center was that it serves as a hub for Water Bureau crews that don鈥檛 usually stay in the office all day, Stuhr said.

鈥淲hen we sat down to design these buildings we looked at what we do here,鈥� he said. 鈥淲e have people that go out into the field. What we wanted to do is build a very austere, functional building.鈥�

Interstate Operations and Maintenance Center

Location: 687 N. Tillamook St.

Cost: $50 million

Construction start date: November 2012

Anticipated construction completion date: February 2016

Owner: Portland Water Bureau

Architect: MWA Architects

Landscape architect: Lango Hansen Landscape Architects

Engineers: ABHT Structural Engineers, Interface Engineering, MEC Engineering, KPFF Consulting Engineers, PBS Engineering + Environmental

General contractor: Hoffman Construction Co.