Seattle-based construction and engineering firm McKinstry has launched a national initiative to expand programs geared to introduce girls and young women to the building trades.

There are two components of the Building Futures program, said Ashley Ruiz, vice president of social impact at McKinstry. One is philanthropic investment, and the other is targeted community service and engagement by McKinstry professionals.

“We’re kicking that off with a handful of investments to a number of different partners, including (Portland-based) Girls Build, who we are very excited to partner with,” Ruiz said.

The initial focus is on programs that reach girls in middle school or high school. The goal is to increase their awareness of career opportunities in the building industry early in their education. Women are significantly underrepresented in engineering and construction, said Laura Swapp, McKinstry’s social impact program director.

“The earlier you begin to see the possibilities, the more likely you are to move on that path,” she said.

Middle school is the ideal time to reach girls and build their confidence, Swapp said.

“A lot of young women have never seen a woman in construction and engineering,” she said. “This is an opportunity for us to show the next generation of girls that there is creative, fulfilling and satisfying careers in construction and engineering.”

The McKinstry Charitable Foundation will donate $1 million by 2030 to nonprofit partners that provide hands-on, industry-relevant learning experiences in skilled trade and applied STEM careers. This year, a total of $200,000 will go to seven entities:

• Girls Build, for construction summer camps for girls ages 8-15 in Oregon and Washington,
• buildHER, for two construction summer camps for girls in grades 7-10 in Seattle,
• Washington State Opportunity Scholarship, for support of first-year students pursuing skilled trade and applied STEM careers,
• Washington Women in Trades, for a skilled trades summer camp for girls ages 11-14,
• Girl Up USA, for virtual and in-person STEAM programming nationwide,
• SheBuilds Futures, for expansion of construction design programs across Texas, and
• STEMblazers, for applied STEM pathway programming in Denver-area high schools.

“We really wanted to focus on these direct, hands-on experiences as being somewhat of our underlying theory of change in this particular initiative,” Ruiz said.

In addition to skills, the girls also learn what it means to be part of a team and how to gain confidence in something they have never done before, Swapp said.

Girls Build, led by Executive Director Katie Hughes, aims to serve girls ages 8-15 — primarily those in the foster care system. This year, summer camps will take place in Portland, Grants Pass, Talent, Sheridan, Tillamook, Warrenton and Morton, Washington. Most of the five-day, outdoor camps (including all three in Portland) have already sold out.

Programming for the summer camps is varied but includes carpentry, sheet metal, concrete, plumbing, solar, blacksmithing, and more.

Hughes said that through the program, she sees girls gain confidence (including socially), an interest in trying new things, and higher academic scores.

When girls are introduced to the trades at high school ages, it is a reach for them because they do not have knowledge or familiarity, Hughes said. That is why Girls Build starts working with girls as young as age 8.

Part of the Building Futures initiative is integrating a hands-on approach within McKinstry’s Building Good program, which is focused on community service and corporate volunteerism. A big part of that, Ruiz said, will be McKinstry professionals mentoring young people in either one-on-one or group settings. There will also be career exploration, jobsite or worksite tours, classroom visits and hands-on learning experiences, such as STEM challenges.

While 30 to 50 percent of graduating high school students are not interested in attending college, about half a million jobs in the construction and engineering industries sit unfilled, Swapp said.

“This is a match made in heaven where there are well-paid, fulfilling jobs,” she said. “There are many young people that don’t know these are available to them as a path.”

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Samaritan Health Services is on a coastal building spree.

Over the past year, significant progress has been made on a pair of large hospital construction projects – one in Newport and another in Lincoln City. Crews at the former site recently completed the first of two major phases of work, while crews at the latter site are tackling rough-in, framing and mechanical, electrical and plumbing work. That new, 52,000-square-foot building will replace an existing wood-framed hospital.

The $42 million Samaritan North Lincoln Hospital project is on schedule to finish in October, within the planned budget, according to spokeswoman Mary Jo Kerlin. Following a switchover of personnel and other resources from the old building, the new hospital is set to open to the public in February 2020. The Lincoln City project was designed by HGA Architects. Skanska USA Building is serving as construction manager/general contractor.

Recently, Skanska’s crews of carpenters, laborers and cement masons were busy finishing sections of the single-story building’s roof slab, while Anning-Johnson carpenters were installing both interior and exterior metal framing. McKinstry has been tasked with MEP work, while Carr Construction performed the steel erection work. Knottworks Construction, one of the few Lincoln City-based contractors involved, carried out civil work and site concrete; later, it will perform additional concrete landscaping.

“The construction of our replacement hospital building has been a wonderful experience, largely due to the skill and professionalism of our design-build team,” said Dr. Lesley Ogden, CEO of both Samaritan North Lincoln Hospital and Samaritan Pacific Communities Hospital in Newport. “I had the opportunity to be part of this project from the beginning, so I saw how our staff and community members were encouraged to provide valuable input and insight. This allowed the architects to design a building unique to our special needs in Lincoln City.”

In addition to constructing a new primary hospital, crews will remodel the existing Health Professions Education Center building to provide administrative space and physical rehabilitation services. The project also includes demolition of the existing hospital building, creation of a new main parking lot, half-street improvements on the campus’ west and south sides, as well as smaller campus improvements.

Both the front and back portions of the new hospital will have offer greater operational efficiency than those in the existing building. This will improve workflow and patients’ privacy, Ogden said.

“The number of dedicated patient rooms will be fewer than what we have currently, but the number of flexible-use spaces is greater,” she said. “The overall effect is more clinical space for better patient care.”

The new hospital is being built with sufficient seismic strength to allow immediate occupancy following a major earthquake. This is standard today for a critical care facility, according to Todd Predmore, a Skanska USA Building vice president and account manager.

In Newport, meanwhile, a $57 million project is under way for Samaritan Health Services. The team of Colorado design-build firm Neenan Archistruction and Corvallis-based T. Gerding Construction is carrying out a rebuild of Pacific Communities Hospital.

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Seattle-based McKinstry has been awarded a six-year contract to provide energy efficiency contracting services to public agencies led by the Port of Portland.

The contract is effective Dec. 1, 2017, to Dec. 3, 2023, with a five-year renewal option. The Port of Portland served as the lead public agency for – a government purchasing alliance. McKinstry was awarded the contract after a competitive bidding process.

The alliance involves 55,000 public agencies in the U.S. The cities of Portland, Beaverton, Eugene, Corvallis and Bend are among the 197 participating agencies in Oregon.

McKinstry operates the Relight America program to convert roadway lighting to energy-efficient LED lighting.

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The city of Hillsboro is seeking more information about the efficiency of its street lights.

McKinstry, a self-described “full-service design, build, operate and maintain firm,” is auditing up to 9,000 of the city’s street lamps to determine if replacing them with high-intensity LEDs would help achieve energy savings. City officials want to know whether the savings from switching to the LED lamps would be worth the cost over time.

“They (LEDs) are at least 50 percent more efficient,” said Michael Johnson, an operations manager at McKinstry. “The life expectancy is also longer than a high-pressure sodium lamp.”

Switching to LEDs could lead to fewer burned up lamps in area landfills.

The city is also working toward a “dark sky” initiative. The hope is to reduce light pollution by using more efficient lights and light shades, and achieve more efficient control over when the lights turn on and off.

“With the new lights, it doesn’t lose light up; it forces it all down,” Johnson said.

The audit is expected to finish by April. If the city decides to move forward with the project, replacing all lights could take up to a year.

“We should be starting installation in late summer and be wrapped up within a year,” Johnson said.

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Sheet metal workers, plumbers and pipe fitters have some of the highest injury rates in the building industry, and McKinstry has spearheaded a coalition to do something about it.

McKinstry, a Seattle-based mechanical contractor with an office in Portland, has teamed up with Comfort Systems USA Northwest, Oregon State University and Central Washington University to produce a safe practices guide for mechanical construction workers.

The idea to compile such a guide started when McKinstry safety risk analyst Ali Vahed learned about a safety and health grant being offered by the Washington State Department of Labor & Industries.

“McKinstry has always been pro-safety, and we looked at the grant and said this is a good opportunity for us to get inside of safety,” he said.

Vahed contacted Sathy Rajendran at CWU, and soon safety professional Darrel Zak of Comfort Systems and OSU engineering professor John Gambatese joined the project team. The group learned in June that it had won the $200,000 state grant administered through the Safety & Health Investments Projects (SHIP) program, according to Vahed.

Approximately 15 applicants vied for the grant, Zak said, but the coalition’s was chosen because it would have the most impact.

“I had done a similar project before,” Rajendran said, “and I always wondered about partnering because I think we have a lot of areas we can improve on.”

Gambatese, meanwhile, has conducted research into construction workers’ health and safety.

Team members will spend the next year and a half compiling information to include in the safe practices guide. The complex process will involve interviewing hundreds of workers in the mechanical construction fields, mostly through questionnaires, Vahed said.

Although there is no proprietary information about safety, Zak said, companies often find their own solutions – even creating special tools – to reduce injuries. It’s that information the coalition hopes to glean, compile and then distribute.

“People come up with their own little ideas and sheet metal shops create their own tools and processes,” Zak said.

Most of the time those innovations and ideas are transmitted either at conferences or by word of mouth, he said, but the coalition hopes to record not only new ideas and tool designs, but how they affect safety and productivity and how they can be most effective.

“We also learn from others’ mistakes,” Zak said. “A lot of times there’s an idea but not a formula for how to get there.”

In addition to interviewing individual workers throughout the region, the team will talk to safety professionals, Zak said.

“We expect (a) fairly large sample size and feel there’s a lot of information out there to be mined,” he said.

Once the information is gathered, Rajendran said, it will be available online and printed in a pocket-size version with both information and pictures.

“It’s so workers can have it with them and if they’re doing a particular task, they can refer to this pocket guide, and it helps them do it safely and efficiently,” he said, noting that approximately 200 hard copies will be distributed initially.

McKinstry and Comfort Systems employ a lot of sheet metal workers who do similar work, Zak said, and he and Vahed have often compared notes.

“Our injuries in type are not different, and we realized as companies we have to go out and look to try to find solutions,” he said. “It all started out as a conversation about how to reduce injuries.”

, based in Silver Spring, Maryland, sheet metal workers, proportionately, are nearly three times more likely than the general working population to suffer a disabling injury.

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When Eric Lemelson and his development team started to brainstorm the idea that would grow into One North, they knew they wanted the project to serve as an example of what could be accomplished by almost any other developer in the Portland-metro area.

The East and West buildings of the three-building office and retail development north of Fremont Street between North Williams and Vancouver avenues in Portland’s Boise neighborhood were designed with Passive House principles in mind. But no actual certification or designation will be sought for One North.

Instead, the goal for the development is to find systems and approaches that could serve as examples and inspirations, the project team members say. As with any pioneering attempt, though, some parts of the project worked out better than others.

‘Wood’ you, could you?

Finding a source of timber for the extensive cedar siding on the West and East buildings required more than a little brainstorming, according to Cory Hawbecker, an associate and sustainability coordinator at Holst Architecture who is acting as project architect for the West and East buildings in the One North development.

The developers didn’t want to use old growth wood, which meant the siding would have to come from second- and third-growth timber, Hawbecker said.

The project team came up with a list of traditional sources for the wood, but Lemelson and his team rejected those options. The majority of the Forest Stewardship Council-certified wood used in the region comes from British Columbia. The development team was concerned that the wood is sometimes taken from First Nation native Indian land and that often only large companies benefit financially from harvest and sale.

The project team was able to find First Nation suppliers out there that benefit the native communities, but the could not provide the quantities needed for the project. So the team began looking instead for small private landowners in our “backyard”.

General contractor R&H Construction took on the task of finding such a provider, Hawbecker said. After an extensive search, R&H found a small co-op of private landowners that used sustainable logging practices in Washington state.

“The owner said he wanted to be able to shake the hand of the guy who cut the trees,” Hawbecker said. “We actually went up (to Washington) and met the guy cutting the trees and saw his operation.”

Working directly with the source providing the timber offered other benefits for the project. Wood from second- and third-growth timber often comes with knotholes and imperfections, Hawbecker said. By working with the co-op, the project team members were able to handpick what they felt were the best pieces for the project as well as specify which portions they did or didn’t want to use.

Lessons learned

One of the project’s unique sustainable features that was mentioned most often during the earliest days of planning for the One North development is no longer being considered as an operating component of the finished development.

A unique heat reclaim system would have transported heated water resulting from the cooling process for freezers at a nearby New Seasons store through a series of underground pipes. The heated water would have traveled up to the roof of the West building, where it would have been used to heat the building.

While heat reclaim, or heat waste, systems make sense in large structures – i.e., hospitals, data centers and universities – the project team realized that getting the system to be profitable on a smaller project like the West building would require additional equipment and money, according to Grayson Hart, who is serving as McKinstry‘s project preconstruction manager, and development team member Owen Gabbert.

The decision to step away from the heat reclaim system wasn’t made lightly. McKinstry, which is handling mechanical, electrical and plumbing engineering and building for the East and West buildings, and the development team tried to make the system pencil out in a number of different ways; it even took a look at whether a nearby hospital could be looped in.

The developers also took several factors into consideration while evaluating whether the heat reclaim system should stay or go. New Seasons was already using some of the heated water from the cooling of its freezers to heat its own offices, Gabbert said, and the current low cost of energy combined with features included in the designs of the East and West buildings were already helping the buildings reach high energy efficiency.

In the end, they decided that investing additional money to finish the system would defeat the overall goal of the project.

“We could have spent the money,” Gabbert said. “But the goal of the project is to say, ‘Here are some systems and concepts (any project) can implement.’

“(One North) is not some ivory tower research project. On our building, we’re getting returns that would be attractive to other developers, and we’re using concepts that can be applied anywhere in the metro area.”

One North’s noteworthy green features

• A variable refrigerant system, or VRF, did not provide only a budget-conscious option; it also meshed well with the project’s design aspects. Holst Architecture created a design that highlighted heavy wood beams in the buildings. Using the ductless VRF system allowed the team to reduce the amount of sheet metal ductwork needed in order to place the visual emphasis on the design.

• Cavity insulation is composed of cellulose, “which is basically ground-up newspaper with a stabilizer to make it flame retardant,” according to project architect Cory Hawbecker.

• By designing and building in accord with Passive House principles, estimates indicate that the East and West buildings will use about half of the energy used by buildings designed and constructed traditionally.

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Typically, competitors in the building industry do not share best practices with each other. But for safety, they can make an exception.

The SafeBuild Alliance, an 85-member nonprofit, has created a unique mentorship program in which nine contractors or subcontractors share with nine minority-owned, women-owned or emerging small businesses their methods of facilitating safe workplaces. Over the next 12 months, the partners will discuss both technical and cultural actions needed to improve workplace safety, SafeBuild Alliance board President Steve Clem said.

The basic premise is not for one company to show another how to rewrite its safety manual, said Clem, Skanska USA Building vice president of preconstruction. Rather, the idea is for experienced firms to share lessons learned whenever possible, he said.

“The bigger companies have invested money in consulting and training,” he said. “If there is a form needed, they probably have it. Small businesses meanwhile are just trying to stay in business. Safety takes money, time and effort.”

Each partnership will operate through its own rules. Participants will visit each other’s shop and work sites with the goal to make measurable improvements in safety over the next year.

The SafeBuild Alliance is hoping to generate from each partnership feedback that it can share will all of its members, Clem said.

He stressed that MWESB firms were participating willingly and that their role as mentee had nothing to do with poor safety records. Both sides can learn from each other, he said.

“Our organization (in the past) hasn’t embraced diversity as fully as it should,” he said. “People were contacted and self-identified who were really motivated and concerned about safety.”

The program mentors are: Mortensen Construction, Hoffman Construction, Skanska USA Building, Andersen Construction, McKinstry, TCM, Oregon Electric Group, EC Co. and Howard S. Wright, a Balfour Beatty Co.

The mentees are: Affordable Electric, Inland Electric, PacificMark Construction, Crestview Construction, NWR Construction, Art Cortez Construction, Professional Minority Group, Parrish Excavating and Liberty Steel.

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SUBMITTED?BY: HOWARD S. WRIGHT

Even before the Edith Green-Wendell Wyatt Federal Building was named one of the country’s top 10 examples of sustainable design by the American Institute of Architects’ Committee on the Environment, the folks at Howard S. Wright knew the renovation project was something special.

“It’s that we’ve made a difference, a difference that will be good for people,” said Matthew Braum, a project manager for Howard S. Wright, which served as general contractor for the renovation.

Back in 2009, it was hard for some to imagine that an aging 1970s era concrete and glass building in downtown Portland would one day become the darling of the local green scene. When the idea was floated to use $137 million in federal stimulus money to renovate the building, more than a few people said the money would be better spent tearing down the existing structure and building an entirely new one.

In the end, though, the renovation went forward with an eye on turning the building into a structure worthy of a LEED platinum rating.
Everything about the renovation was about innovation,” Braum said.

The redesign features biophyllic and rhythmic aluminum shades on three sides of the building to optimize interior light while reducing thermal warming. It is 55 percent more energy efficient than the original structure and features elevators that generate energy to replenish the grid as they descend. Intelligent systems provide continuous monitoring of systems in the building.
Cutler-Anderson Architects of Seattle, which worked on design aspects with Portland-based SERA Architects, called the project “the kind of thing we reach for as designers.”

The building features 20 levels – including two that are underground – and more than 500,000 total square feet of office space that accommodates 16 federal agencies and approximately 1,200 employees.

“It’s satisfying to me,” project manager Braum said, “that, as a team, what we’ve accomplished will be here for another 50 years to serve the community.”

PROJECT?TEAM + STATS:
Location: Portland, Oregon
Cost: $137 million
Start date: September 2010
Completion date: May 2013
Owner/developer: General Services Administration (GSA)
Architect: Cutler Anderson, SERA Architects
Engineers: KPFF Consulting Engineers, McKinstry, Stantec
General contractor: Howard S. Wright

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McKinstry, a Seattle-based mechanical-electrical contractor that has operated an office in Portland since 1969, recently opened a full-service office in Hillsboro.

The new office is needed to serve the company’s “confidential client in Hillsboro” (widely known as Intel), as well as other existing clients and emerging business opportunities west of Portland, said Joe Korte, general manager of the 10,000-square-foot facility on Northwest Evergreen Parkway.

“Our intention is to be able to provide those services available from our main office in closer proximity to our main clients,” he said. “We’ve had some great success in delivering a variety of construction services on the west side of Portland to the degree that it involved making those services readily available to those customers.”

McKinstry provides design-build-operate-maintain services for mechanical and electrical systems to clients building data centers, corporate campuses and advanced technology centers. Thirty employees are stationed at its new Hillsboro facility, Korte said.

Investments by the “confidential client” have spurred additional investments by related businesses in the area. Future work could include data centers and expansions, Korte said.

“I think right now in the industry, and in part with some of our key customers, they’re looking for new approaches for design and construction of their facilities,” he said. “They’re trying for innovative approaches that we’re perfectly aligned for.”

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Design-build firm McKinstry is remodeling a Eugene data center for Lane County.

Slightly less than $3 million is being invested to improve cooling systems and increase technological reliability. Energy savings are expected to be approximately $25,000 per year.

The project is part of an overall effort to improve energy efficiency of Lane County buildings, said Grant Wood, a program manager with McKinstry’s Portland office.

“This is the first project we evaluated with the county because we knew it was an energy hog,” he said.

The 4,000-square-foot data center was built in the 1970s and holds about 295 servers that store police records, taxation forms, budget documents, health care files and information about roads, construction and permitting. The center, part of the Lane County government offices in downtown Eugene, also houses data for the cities of Eugene and Springfield, the Lane Council of Governments and the Eugene Water & Electric Board.

McKinstry crews anticipate finishing work in October, Wood said. Lane County officials plan to move all servers back into the center by spring 2015.

One of the biggest improvements is the addition of self-contained air conditioning pods for the servers, Wood said. The pods will save energy by cooling only the servers instead of the entire room.

A system of pipes carrying cold water will help cool the pods. During cold-weather months, this water will be pumped through a new cooling tower and chilled by outside air, Wood said.

“You’re providing free cooling,” he said. “All you have is the energy to pump the water.”

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