USU building proven unsafe
Utah construction companies met Nov. 9 under the direction of the Division of Facilities Construction and Management of Utah (DFCM) to start a bid scramble for selection to reconstruct the Engineering Lab building on Utah State University’s Campus.
DFCM announced in October that it would be requesting proposals and showed the proposed plans for the building at the Nov. 9 meeting.
The current Engineering Lab building was built in 1960. While it was originally built to code, several areas of the building – including the air duct system, stairwells, restrooms, and overall seismic structure – no longer come close to meeting safety codes, Alma Moser, associate dean of the College of Engineering, said.
The renovation is in response to an initiative from former Utah Governor Michael Leavitt that seeks to increase the capacity and quality of engineering education in Utah, Blake Court of DFCM said.
“[The Engineering Lab building project] has a sister project at the University of Utah,” Court said.
Utah’s building project will begin after USU’s, possibly in the spring, Court said.
Reconstruction will be jointly funded by the College of Engineering and DCFM. The college must provide $10 million, Tom Graham, architectural project coordinator for USU, said.
Final proposals and bids from the construction companies are due in December. Construction should start in the late spring, after the semester is over, Moser said.
“That’s the schedule. If everything goes according to what we’re thinking,” Moser said.
Along with major safety upgrades, the building will become a facility comparable to the new engineering building on campus.
Classroom flexibility will be obtained by replacing permanent walls with moveable ones. Day-lighting will lighten up the current building and another connection to the new engineering building.
“It will cause a big problem for us because that’s where our labs are. We’re going to kind of crunch up into the new building,” Moser said.
DFCM’s mission is to “ensure that the citizens of Utah receive full value in the design, construction, and management of state facilities,” the company’s Web site, dfcm.utah.gov states.
The companies that attended the meeting were Ascent Construction, Big-D Construction, Darrell W. Anderson Construction, Gramoll Construction, Hogan and Associates Construction, Hughes General Contractors, Interior Construction Specialists, Jacobsen Construction, Raymond Construction and Spindler Construction.
-natandrews@cc.usu.edu