 Mon. December 14, 2009
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Maynard, MA—JM Coull earned two awards for excellence in construction last month at the annual awards program of the Massachusetts chapter of the Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC). The association’s top “Eagle” award and the “Green” award both recognized JM Coull’s design-build construction of a new facility in Lawrence, Mass., for the United States Citizenship & Immigration Services (CIS). Gorman Richardson Architects of Hopkinton was the project architect. The awards were presented at the ABC awards banquet on November 18 in Boston.
The 62,000-square-foot facility houses offices, specialty areas for naturalization services, and an underground parking garage below the building. It occupies the site of the former Lincoln Foods Building in downtown Lawrence. JM Coull demolished the condemned mill building to make way for the new facility, uncovering multiple unknown existing-condition challenges. The ingenuity and perseverance displayed by the team in overcoming the obstacles were cited by the awards committee in recognizing JM Coull.
The discovery on site of unsuitable and contaminated soils was compounded by the uncovering of an active, but undocumented, sewer line running through the middle of the site. The line was actively used to convey storm water, but had previously been the repository of raw sewage from outhouses connected to the pipe by vertical shafts, intact, but undetected below grade until excavation for the parking garage began. The construction focus quickly shifted to finding a solution for capping the shafts, shoring up the archaic and fragile sewer line, remediating the contaminated and unsuitable soils, and installing footings for the new building.
The answer came in the form of an elaborate system of 239 jet grout geopiers, designed to both compensate for the unsuitable soils and distribute the building loads. It also protected the more-than-100-year-old line from impact damage from the conventional piles that were originally proposed. Custom-engineered caps for the vertical shafts enabled the team to reduce the shaft height by 10 feet and prepare the site to support the loads imposed by the underground parking garage.
In addition to the Excellence in Construction award for the project size category, the CIS project also merited the ABC’s “Green” award for sustainable construction. The facility is a candidate for Silver Level certification under the United States Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program. Sustainable elements of the project began with demolition of the existing building, in which 13,000 tons of material were diverted from landfills. Some of the materials were used in the construction of the new CIS facility, while timbers, planks and bricks were cleaned and sold for use in other projects. A staggering 98.4 percent of the demolition debris was recycled or reused.
By winning the top award in its category regionally, the CIS project is eligible to compete in ABC’s national competition. Winners will be announced in 2010. |
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