Airport Projects Aim to Ease Congestion for Passengers and Airlines

Maintenance projects and long planned additions will expand the space available to port employees in Portand and supply a new rental car facility at Sea-Tac in Seattle.

By Deb Wood

Projects at Portland International Airport and Seattle-Tacoma International Airport (Sea-Tac Airport) will allow the facilities to handle more passengers and give them a better experience.

Port of Portland

The Port of Seattle stalled work on the Sea-Tac car rental facility while it obtained funding for the project. Turner Construction is the general contractor. (Image courtesy of Port of Seattle)

The Port of Portland is building a $166-million, seven-story, 1.2 million sq ft, 3,500-car parking deck topped with an $85-million, three-story, 205,500 sq ft port headquarters building at Portland International Airport. The project will consolidate 473 of the port’s 700 employees at one location.

“We’re combining marine and aviation operations all in one location, and we realized for some years we would need more parking at the airport,” says Martha Richmond, a port spokesperson. The Portland airport had record-setting passenger traffic from July 2007 to June 2008, with 14.8 million people enplaning and deplaning. That dropped to 13.3 million in 2008-2009. The port authority funded the garage with a combination of working capital and revenues from parking, rental car, air cargo and other collections at the airport.

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Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Architects of Portland designed the project. Hoffman Construction Co. of Portland began construction in 2007. Crews excavated 66,000 cu yds of dirt.

The team seeks LEED-gold certification. Green features include a Living Machine, an organic wastewater treatment plant that will treat water for nonpotable uses, such as flushing toilets. The plant is designed to treat 5,000 gallons per day.

A geothermal system with 200 wells, reaching depths of 300 ft, will help to heat and cool the building. An atrium will bring daylighting into the office building’s core. The project’s close proximity to the Columbia River required a pile foundation, with 1,600 16-in.-diameter, vibratory steel piles. Because the work was taking place next to a control tower, the contractor had to coordinate pile-driving operations with the Federal Aviation Administration.

The structural-steel frame headquarters portion of the building sits atop the north half of the post-tensioned concrete garage. The project required 50,000 cu yds of concrete, 6,500 tons of rebar, 2.2 million ft of post-tension cable and 1,400 tons of structural steel.

The Port of Portland will have a new headquarters and a parking garage at Portland International Airport when Hoffman Construction, Portland, finishes the LEED Gold project. (Image courtesy of Port of Portland)

“One challenge was avoiding a visual obstruction of the runway with the crane,” says Dave Garske, project manager for Hoffman. “We had to make sure we were not creating an unsafe situation” for the air-traffic controllers.

Hoffman broke the construction into two halves, completing the north parking deck first. An expansion joint in the garage enabled the company to phase the work.

“We needed to get the construction of the headquarters going as fast as we could,” Garske says. “There was so much detail with the glazing, LEED and mechanical. It was critical to get that going.”

Hoffman anticipates completion in April 2010. Because the port has sold its existing building, Garske says the finish date cannot slip.

In May, the Port of Portland began the first, $20-million, six-month phase of a $63.5-million project that will extend and rehabilitate the north runway. Wildish Standard Paving of Eugene, Ore., will lengthen the runway from 8,000 ft to 9,827 ft, so it can handle large passenger and cargo aircraft, including international flights.

Sea-Tac Rental Care Facility

Turner Construction Co. of Seattle is building a $350-million, 2.1 million sq ft, 5,400-vehicle Rental Car Facility with quick turn-around areas at Sea-Tac. The project consumes nearly the entire 23-acre site.

Repaving the Sea-Tac runway took incredible coordination, because contractors had to work around airline traffic that crossed the runway. Icon used the existing pavement as a base course, after grinding it up.(Photo Credit: Port of Seattle)

The total budget is $419.3 million, which includes a bus maintenance shop, road improvements and changes at the main terminal to accommodate the shuttle buses that will take passengers to and from the rental car facility. The bus maintenance facility will be bid in early 2010 as a separate project.

“The consolidated center will take the offsite companies and the larger ones [now with locations in the airport] and put them in one spot,” says Perry Cooper, spokesperson for the airport.

Walker Parking Consultants of Elgin, Ill., is managing design.

A customer facility charge added to every car rental will pay for nearly the entire cost of the project.

The project broke ground in June 2008. But the Port of Seattle suspended the job in December, with the project 17% complete, due to the turmoil in the financial markets. Turner kept about 25 people on staff to maintain the site during the suspension. Work resumed in July, after the port sold $317 million in revenue bonds.

“We’re back alive and running hard to try to recover lost time,” says Craig Holt, project executive with Turner.

Turner has resumed work on the mat and spread-footing foundation. The company has set four of six 20,000-gallon fuel tanks, measuring 10 ft by 37 ft, in a 17-ft hole on a bed of pea gravel.

“They look like mini submarines,” Holt says. “They are roughly the size of a school bus and will hold enough fuel to fill a typical small car with a 10-gallon tank 2,000 times.”

The project is now tracking for a spring 2012 completion.

Icon placed a 20-in thick concrete surface, thick enough to support the heaviest planes. (Photo credit: Port of Seattle.)

The team seeks LEED certification. Sustainability elements include using low-VOC paints, sealants, adhesives and carpets; installing low-flow fixtures; filtering and recycling 85% of the water used to wash vehicles; and treating stormwater to prevent sediment and pollutants from reaching local creeks and killing salmon.

“We have an Olympic-size swimming pool that will house the stormwater before it leaves the site and runs through filters,” Holt says. It will become the floor plate for one of the levels of the parking garage, so no one will ever know it’s there, he adds.

Turner had recycled 97% of construction materials.

Sea-Tac runway reconstruction

ICON Materials of Tukwila, Wash., completed a $52-million rehabilitation of Sea-Tac’s first and longest runway (16L/34R at 11,901 ft) at the end of September. Total project cost was $85 million, including taxiways and a new safety light project.

“We’re reconstructing it for the first time since it was built in 1944,” airport spokesperson Cooper says.

Over the years, the airport expanded the runway and repaved with asphalt, but until the third runway was completed in fall 2008 and could handle traffic, the airport could not close the first runway.

Federal Aviation Administration grants and revenue bonds sold in 2005 paid for the project. Port of Seattle engineering staff competed the engineering.

All planes taking off and landing on runways two and three had to cross the construction zone. Crews shut down each one of eight taxiways for 45 days or 50 days, depending on the intersection, completed the work and then reopened that one and closed another. ICON built a temporary taxiway to handle some of the air traffic. A taxiway at the north and south end remained open at all times.

“The most challenging part of the whole project was the interaction with the active airport,” says Bruce Harjehausen, construction division manager for ICON. “We had up to 1,000 planes crossing our project every day.”

Harjehausen says the company met every milestone and beat the deadlines on several of them. He says the company emphasized safety and completed the job with only one recordable injury.

ICON crews ground off, broke up and hauled away about 280,000 tons of asphalt, 2 ft thick from atop the original concrete runway. That work took about 3.5 months.

Crews crushed the 60,000 cu yds of concrete from the original runway and recycled it as gravel for the new runway’s 12-in.-thick subbase. That was topped with 4 in. of asphalt-treated base.

Then ICON began paving a 20-in.-thick Portland cement concrete surface, which can accommodate the largest and heaviest aircraft. The job consumed 120,000 cu yds of new concrete.

The company completed the concrete runway paving and asphalt shoulders by early September.

The port authority expects the new runway will last 40 years. ICON worked two shifts and completed the project in six months.

Sound Transit

Sound Transit also has a project at Sea-Tac, extending the light-rail line from Tukwila Station to the Terminal Station.

Bruce Gray, spokesman for Sound Transit, says agency had planned a terminal station in 2001, but after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the Port of Seattle re-evaluated its plans, forcing Sound Transit to redo its alignment into the airport.

Mowat Construction Co. of Woodinville, Wash., began the $269-million project to extend the guideway and build the station in the fourth quarter of 2006. The project is coming in slightly below budget and on time by the end of the year.

The Port of Seattle built a pedestrian walk bridge from the station to the parking garage, from which passengers can enter the terminal. Trains will run to and from Sea-Tac every six to 10 minutes. The ride to Seattle will take about 33 minutes.