Portland-based Advanced American Construction recently was awarded a $24.5 million contract to rebuild and strengthen the South Terminal wharf at the Port of Everett in Washington, the port announced last week.

The South Terminal, a 700-foot-long concrete deck structure, was built in the late 1970s to accommodate transport of forest products, according to the port. Modern cargo operations typically require a greater weight-bearing capacity than the wharf has at present, and port officials planned an upgrade even before the Marine Terminal Master Plan was adopted in 2008.

Advanced American Construction is set to strengthen a 560-foot-long stretch of the South Terminal (a 140-foot-long stretch was upgraded in 2015) and make electrical improvements. Construction is scheduled to begin in April and finish in December 2019.

“Upon completion, the dock will be strong enough to accommodate two 100-foot gauge rail-mounted container cranes and provide vaults for ships to plug into shorepower,” according to the port.

Current work, phase 2 of the project, is expected to cost a total of around $30 million. In May 2015, phase 1 wrapped up with construction of a 140-foot-by-110-foot “heavylift pad” pad allowing for heavy cargo operations.

Advanced American Construction representatives did not return phone messages seeking comment.

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The Associated General Contractors’ Oregon-Columbia chapter is honoring eight people for their work improving safety.

The Recognition Of Safety Excellence Award (ROSE) will be presented at AGC‘s annual meeting Jan. 22. ROSE winners are eligible to win the AGC’s Construction Safety and Excellence Award (CSEA) at the national convention in March.

ROSE award honorees are: Steve Spurlock, General Sheet Metal; Jim Jones, Fred Shearer & Sons; Art Bush, R&H Construction; Jeremy Lawson, Slayden Construction Group; Jake Bishop, MB Structures; Tiffany Goss, Todd Hess Building Co.; Mike Reno, Goodfellow Bros.; and Steve Summers, Advanced American Construction.

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SUBMITTED?BY: ADVANCED?AMERICAN?CONSTRUCTION

Less was more for the team that worked on the Bull Run 2 Tower Improvement project for the Portland Water Bureau.
The team, with Advanced American Construction as general contractor, was tasked with installing a new selective withdrawal structure on an existing dam tower in order to continue providing Portland residents with fresh drinking water while also protecting salmon in the watershed.

The project challenges were complex and multilayered. Crews had to tackle heavy marine, civil, dive and dredge work in an environmentally sensitive area without interrupting the city’s water services.
Working with the water bureau and Black & Veatch Engineering, Advanced American tapped into solutions that brought environmental sensitivity to all aspects of the construction work.

Key to the project’s success was the creation of an underwater retaining wall – 125 feet deep and nearly one-quarter-mile long – that encircled the foundation point of the tower. This allowed dredging to occur without stirring up sediment and clouding the surrounding water. Real-time monitors ensured turbidity did not reach undesirable levels throughout the project.

Crews adhered to a strict code of conduct that ensured no exterior contamination from human activity. Wherever possible, machines were converted to electric. Drip pans caught fluids beneath heavy equipment and biodegradable lubricants replaced petroleum products. Synthetic and wood fiber BMPs were used to control erosion, thereby avoiding potential contamination from straw bales and waddles.

“Everyone was excited to come to work,” project manager Jake Duyck said. “It’s a remote location and everything we did was designed to tread lightly.
“The fun part was that we could see wildlife the whole time. Deer were at the site every day. Bear, mountain lions, eagles  – they all came and watched us. That doesn’t happen on most construction sites, and I think it affected our appreciation for what we were doing.”

PROJECT?TEAM + STATS:
Location: Sandy, Oregon
Cost: $31 million
Start date: February 2012
Completion date: November 2013
Owner/developer: Portland Water Bureau
Engineer: Black & Veatch
General contractor: Advanced American Construction Inc.

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The Schweiger Memorial Scholarship Fund, an annual scholarship program formed by , will reward $37,000 in scholarships to 13 students from Oregon and Washington at an April 20 ceremony at the Governor Hotel.

The students were chosen out of a field of 42 applicants for their high level of work in pursuit of careers in construction and construction-related fields. Depending on the ranking given to them by the fund’s selection committee, each student will receive between $2,000 and $5,000 toward their school bills.

Mike Johns, vice president of operations for Advanced American Construction, said the program rewards the students for their hard work, while also giving them a chance to meet and network with people in the industry.

The program was created in 1999 as a tribute to Forrest Schweiger, who lost his life in a construction accident at age 26. In 2002, with the death of his father Konrad Schweiger, the fund’s name was changed to honor both of their deaths.

“It became really based on someone we knew, and this is a way we could give back money donated by a lot of different people as a memorial,” Johns said.

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Portland City Council this week authorized a maximum price of $31.5 million for a construction manager/general contractor contract with to modify a tower in Bull Run Reservoir 2. The project will help the Portland Water Bureau keep the Bull Run River cool, to meet federal Clean Water Act requirements the city agreed to in 2009.

The work is expected to cost between $27.5 million and $29.5 million – still significantly higher than a 2008 planning estimate of $10 million for a similar scope of work. But that estimate didn’t account for such specialized work in a remote location, according to water bureau officials.

In the reservoir, two towers act as “straws” and collect water that is either sent into Portland’s water distribution system or released downstream into the Bull Run River, according to Portland Water Bureau administrator David Shaff. Presently, those towers have intakes only at the bottom of the river, where water is colder, and that is a problem for the natural habitat. Removal of colder water during summer months means the river can be 4 to 5 degrees Celsius warmer than it would be naturally.

“We have obligations under the Clean Water Act to ensure that we keep conditions on Bull Run at a certain temperature to improve fish habitat,” Shaff said. He told City Council that though 4 degrees Celsius may not seem like much of a change, “it makes a difference to the fish.”

In 2009, the city of Portland agreed to a habitat conservation plan that laid out how it could bring its 1960s-era water infrastructure into compliance with federal legislation. One of those projects is the tower project, which, with City Council approval, will move forward soon. Construction is expected to be done by 2013.

Portland Water Bureau Chief Engineer Mike Stuhr last week told City Council there are many factors that contributed to the project’s cost estimate being much greater now than in 2008. Most of them relate to the fact that the project – now 90 percent designed by Black and Veatch – is based on realities not considered a few years ago.

To help regulate the river’s temperature, crews will install a “box” on the outside of one of the towers at Bull Run Reservoir 2. The box will have gates at multiple levels to intake water, so that the city can decide whether to remove water from the bottom, the middle or the top of the reservoir. The bureau will be able to keep cold water at the bottom of the reservoir to be used when it’s needed to keep the river cool in late summer, Shaff said.

The work will be performed by crews diving deep underwater. The cost for labor is therefore higher than expected, Shaff said, because crews will include both individual divers and people to constantly monitor their safety. Also, there are underwater time limits for divers, and the work is specialized and complicated.

Shaff said this has increased the project’s cost substantially. When planners were estimating the cost in 2008, he said, “they weren’t anticipating as much expensive diving as it’s become clear it would take.”

The project’s scope is also different. Planners previously thought a simpler approach would be plausible, and that only 60 tons of steel would be needed. But the planned project will use 375 tons of steel.

Another major factor is that Bull Run Reservoir 2 is approximately 25 miles outside of downtown Portland, and equipment must be hauled there on small streets and across bridges. Barges and cranes will need to be disassembled for transport.

“The barges are wider than the bridge they would go over,” Stuhr said. “The initial planning estimate didn’t account for how hard it is to get up there.”

Scott Fernandez, a microbiologist and a former citizen member of the Portland Utility Review Board, brought up an additional concern – invasive species could latch onto barges, cranes and other equipment and then end up in Bull Run water.

“Aquatic nuisance species are a problem in Oregon,” Fernandez said.

Stuhr told councilors that before being placed in water, all barges, cranes and other equipment will be cleaned to avoid the spread of invasive species like zebra mussels.

Also, the project’s scope recently was expanded to include a “fish flow” effort in which reservoir systems will be replumbed so that water from the towers can go either into the river or the city’s water supply.

The $4.5 million project was previously tied to creation of a UV treatment facility required by the Oregon Health Authority. However, the OHA announced recently that it would grant the city a variance, so it did not have to build the treatment plant, and the fish flow plant was added to the tower project.

Shaff told City Council that he didn’t believe the cost of the Bull Run Reservoir 2 tower project would increase water bills for Portland residents, as long as the cost stayed under the guaranteed maximum price set by the contractor.

“I still think we’re getting a very good deal for this kind of work,” Stuhr said.

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A local project has earned bragging rights as the most significant project in the country for 2010, according to the Associated General Contractors.

The Lake Oswego Interceptor Sewer project was named winner of the Grand Award when the Aon Build America awards were handed out by AGC last week.

was the contractor for the project, which also earned a top award in the best new municipal and utilities category. Work consisted of the replacement of a 50-year-old hazardous sewer line and required crews to drill 270 feet into bedrock to install system anchors. The project, which required more than 1,200 commercial dives, was completed without any lost-time accidents.

Ted Aadland, AGC president and CEO of Portland-based , said the Lake Oswego project and the others honored were jobs that most contractors “dread starting” but “dream of completing.”

Nineteen other projects, including two in Oregon, were named Aon Award winners in individual categories. The Round Butte Dam Selective Water Withdrawal project handled by was honored as best new environmental construction while ‘s Savage Rapids Dam Removal project was selected as the best environmental renovation.

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Up to 24 lineal feet of Oswego Lake will disappear beginning Sept. 7, when the city will begin to draw the lake down to attach a sewer interceptor to a new pipeline.

“It’s the first buoyant, submerged, gravity-flowing pipeline in the world,” said Joel Komarek, project director for the city of Lake Oswego.

The new pipe is comprised of nearly 10,000 feet of buoyant, high-density polyethylene material, which is tied down and suspended 15 to 20 feet below the lake’s surface by stainless-steel rope. The rope is attached to ground anchors, which were drilled down into the lake’s bedrock and grouted into place.

A major portion of the pipe was placed in the lake from November 2009 to April 2010. But additional pipes need to be placed and attached, a process that requires the lake to be drawn down. The water will be pumped into the Willamette River through a creek known as both Oswego Creek and Sucker Creek. The overall goal of the project is for the new pipeline to be attached and running by May 2011.

“The old line, which runs through the lake, was installed in the early 1960s,” said Jeff Selby, citizen information coordinator for the Lake Oswego Interceptor Sewer project. “The old one doesn’t have enough capacity and is structurally at risk. It is sitting on steel and lumber (that) is deteriorating. Even a mild earthquake could rupture the pipe and fill the lake with sewage.”

By remaining suspended in water and not fixed to support piles, the new pipe will not be susceptible to such risks. The pipeline is in a horizontal s-shape to allow the high-density polyethylene to expand and contract as the lake’s temperature changes. The horizontal bends allow the pipe to fluctuate in size without disrupting the consistent slope that is required for the pipeline to be gravity-based.

“The lake falls two feet over a distance of 10,000 feet, and we had to install the pipe and maintain that grade over a long distance,” Komarek said. “Every 25 feet there was an anchor installed and attached to the pipe. The contractor had to then survey the pipe at every anchor to make sure the proper slope was acquired.”

Each of the 428 tethers, which are attached to the anchor points, can be individually adjusted to maintain the required grade.

Advanced American Construction Inc. was awarded the $26 million bid for the project’s first phase, which included bending, sinking, and adjusting the pipe to get the proper grade required. Over 17,000 linear feet of pipe was fused together into 1,200-foot strings and anchored into the lake.

J.W. Fowler will be the contractor for the project’s second phase, which is known as the “lake down” – the pipe will be connected to a new, pile-supported, submerged pipe on the lake’s west end and to an existing interceptor on the east end.

The lake will be filled back up beginning in March 2011 with a combination of rainwater, Tualatin River water, runoff and water from local streams and creeks.

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The excitement in Newport, which the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration picked as the new home for its Marine Operations Center-Pacific, has spread to the state’s building community. A pre-proposal meeting last week drew more than 30 firms, including some of Oregon’s biggest builders.

Nearly all of the 65 names on the Port of Newport‘s sign-in sheet came from Oregon or Southwest Washington companies, or those with local offices. The meeting was mandatory for companies planning to submit a proposal to be the construction manager-general contractor on the $38.3 million project.

The project involves building a pier to accommodate six NOAA research ships and a dock for smaller boats. Buildings include an 18,000-square-foot office building, a 25,000 square-foot warehouse and smaller security and hazardous materials buildings. The construction budget is $28 million.

Construction companies including Andersen, Hoffman, Skanska and Turner attended the meeting, along with many smaller and specialty contractors.

The broad range of highly specialized work put the project off limits to some contractors. After attending the meeting, Perlo McCormack Pacific project manager Chris Culbertson said his company probably won’t submit a proposal.

“It isn’t exactly what would be our standard work,” Culbertson said. “It’s mostly the pier work we haven’t done, and there’s some pretty extensive pier work.”

Mannie Mills, project manager with Lease Crutcher Lewis, said he has worked on projects all along the Pacific coast. That, combined with the company’s building expertise, should make for a strong proposal, Mills said.

Port officials emphasized the project’s green side at the meeting, Mills said.

“The key points they expressed to us were the LEED goals and the sustainable approach to the construction work,” he said. “Our strong background in CM-GC projects puts us in a good position for this project, and my experience includes heavy marine work.”

Emerick Construction and Advanced American Construction point to each firm’s area of expertise as a joint venture, the only joint venture planning to submit a proposal.

“This project has two very unique aspects: the land side and the water side,” said Dale Kuykendall, business development manager with Emerick.

“We’re very experienced in CM-GC (projects) on the building side,” Kuykendall said. Advanced American brings expertise in marine construction, including dock, piling and concrete work.

Putting the two together “makes a lot of sense,” he said.

The project will be paid for with $19.5 million in state lottery bonds, said owner’s representative Joshua Dodson, with the remainder coming from port revenue bonds. Proposals are due Oct. 6.

At the preproposal meeting, port officials’ stressed that the project’s effect will be greater than its dollar value, Kuykendall said. “It reminded us of the importance of this project to the Port of Newport and to the community,” he said. “And we’re all about those types of projects.”

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