Campus Construction Update: March 25, 2016

While a timetable is yet to be finalized, the beginning of April will likely see the start of site work at the new Campus Avenue Project residences.

If you’re in the neighborhood, you’ll know it’s happening when the fence, and its supporting Jersey barriers, around the construction sites at 55 and 65 Campus Ave. starts to go away. The fence removal is likely to commence at the intersection of Campus and Central avenues.

Another essential prerequisite for site work is simply clearing the site: removing storage containers and tool sheds, relocating or removing building materials, shooing Campus Construction Update out of the way, etc. “Just a lot of cleanup,” explains Chris Streifel, who manages the residence construction for Bates Facility Services.

What else is involved in site work, that mysteriously inclusive term? Like so many things, it’s a process of going from coarse to fine. For instance, the soil needs to be graded before much else can happen.

Other early steps include excavating for and creating various species of storm water infrastructure. From Franklin Street, you can see one such facility already begun at 65 Campus: a shallow depression, or swale, that will filter runoff through grass and a variety of particulate layers, cleansing it for release into city drains.

While the subterranean wiring for outdoor lighting is pretty much done, pre-fab concrete bases for lighting poles will be placed early on, with the poles themselves following close behind. (You can see a few bases, still awaiting their poles, that were implanted last year on the Chase Hall side of Campus Avenue near the Kenison Gate.)

Then will come hardscaping — paved walkways, decorative walls, and so forth. The plantings will come last. And because different plant types like to be set out at different times of year, that work could extend into the fall.

There’s another, less apparent prerequisite for the site work, too: finishing the exterior work on the upper stories of the two residences. That’s because you need cherry pickers to enable workers to do things like install sheet metal trim — but cherry pickers and site work are mutually exclusive.

The lifts get in the way. “As site work starts in a given area, lifts need to be moved out,” Streifel says. “And to get them back in becomes problematic.”

So the exterior subcontractors are scrambling to finish sheet metal work, plate glass installation, lightning protection systems.

The plate glass, aka storefront, needs to be complete prior to site work for another notable reason. Once the fence is gone, there won’t be much of a physical barrier to keep intruders off the site. So the buildings themselves need to be securable.

How about the interior work? As much as Campus Construction Update likes to describe that scene as a beehive, Streifel notes that the buzzing is becoming more like a murmur as tasks are completed.

Utilities work, too, is moving from coarse to fine. While technicians are still completing terminal connections for electricity, plumbing, heating, etc., the branch feeders that bring services throughout the buildings were completed last week. The last of that work took place on the first floor at 65 Campus.

More specifically, the Bates computer network is live in both buildings. That’s a necessity for the “integrators” — technicians who tie together the electrical, telecom, and mechanical systems that are mutually reliant, such as heating, security, and life safety.

Since mid-February, the main electrical panels in each building have been juiced up, and electricians have been going from floor to floor powering up subpanels, removing the temporary panels on their wooden stands, and hooking up the light fixtures, outlets, Dyson Airblade hand dryers, and other so-called loads that actually use the current.

The last of the drywall mudding and taping is underway, with the outstanding work concentrated on the first and second floors of No. 55. Plenty of new paint is in evidence, as is rip-sawn red oak wall paneling in No. 65 — notably in the spiffy Treehouse Lounge on the fourth floor — and carpeting.

Can we talk? Campus Construction Update welcomes queries and comments about current, past, and future construction at Bates. Write to dhubley@bates.edu, putting “Campus Construction” or “Shoo!” in the subject line. Or use the comments system below.