CONRAC

With three levels, this 1.2 million-square-foot facility includes 900 linear feet of moving walkways, a covered entry plaza from Short-Term Parking, an on-grade quick turnaround facility, three 20,000-gallon underground storage tanks, 54 fueling stations, 10 carwash bays and public art.

Because the new construction tied into an active garage, extensive planning and scheduling were required to ensure that airport operations were not affected during construction. The new facility incorporated multiple foundation systems, including deep foundation (drilled piers), pile caps, grade beam, and strip and spread foundations. Foundation pits were required for the escalator, elevator and moving sidewalks, and vertical cast-in-place concrete foundation walls, retaining walls, stem walls, barrier walls and columns were also part of the design.

The 510,000-square-foot slab-on-grade was tricky, because compound slopes were required at the floor drains in each of the structure’s bays. A helical cast-in-place ramp went to the levels above, in addition to two other cast-in-place post tension ramps tying into the existing structure. We applied a colored dry shake hardener to the slab-on-metal deck in the walkway areas, and used a liquid hardener and diamond grind polishing process on an additional 24,000 square feet of floor. We also added 690,000 square feet of reinforced topping slabs over the precast.