We were all thrilled when we received confirmation from Corporate Office Properties Trust (COPT) that Sain was selected to perform surveying, civil, and traffic engineering for the Redstone Advanced Gateway – the second major phase of construction for the expansive Redstone Gateway Master Plan at Redstone Arsenal. It is a great privilege to participate in such a high-profile, fast-moving project with a world-class development team.
This 96-acre phase of the overall project is planned to construct 720,000 square feet of commercial, light industrial, and office space within the next 18 to 24 months. This project is a collaboration between COPT, Redstone Arsenal, and the City of Huntsville, and is master planned to construct over 3,500,000 additional square feet within the Gateway area.
In the past year, Sain completed design for Phase I of the Secured Parkway project, which had a similar schedule, and the success of that project set the stage for the larger Phase 2 Advanced Gateway project. This Phase 2 project included mass earthwork totaling 460,000 cubic yards, major drainage work including master-detention, two 10’ x 6’ box culverts, as well as roadway construction, utility installation, and two traffic signals.
All told, this massive sitework project totaled approximately $12M, and it is scheduled to be completed by November 2020. Furthermore, while this massive project is under construction, we had five separate building projects within the construction site, which needed to be going vertical, with the first building to be completed in March 2020. This project has many different moving parts that need coordination so that buildings can be constructed vertically, while sitework is being performed horizontally all around these structures.
Due to the aggressive schedule of the project, several of the office building pads had to be sequenced to occur at the beginning of the overall mass sitework, to allow foundations and building construction to begin. Also, due to the close proximity of concrete box culverts to the buildings, certain portions of the sitework had to be accelerated to provide separation between the drainage construction and the building construction.
To meet the design and construction schedule, Sain had to completely design this massive project, coordinate locations of all new utilities, and obtain construction permits within less than two months. We had multiple engineers designing different portions of the site simultaneously, talking about their design decisions, and reviewing their plans together to verify that they meshed seamlessly. In total, there were over 100 sheets in the civil design plans, including site work, utilities, electrical, and traffic engineering. We completed this project on time because of the skill and dedication of our surveyors and engineers, and their ability to leverage 3-D civil design tools to create accurate and complete design plans.