DenverInfill Blog

It great to see companies doing the right thing, like protecting its employees and the environment. That’s especially true for a company in an industry that is inherently dangerous and that produces enormous amounts of waste.

Last year on the Union Station project, Kiewit employees had zero safety incidents and zero accidents, as defined by OSHA’s standards, which, in my experience are clearly defined and strict. Company wide, Kiewit’s accident rate is more than 75% lower than its industry average.

The commitment to recycling is just as impressive. As of October 2010, Kiewit diverted 9,719 tons of construction waste from landfills, which is over 98% of the waste that left the Union Station construction site. That is equivalent to 748 filled trash trucks, or the waste of nearly 650,000 homes.

So how do they do achieve these superlative results?

On the safety front, cautionary signs and motivational posters are everywhere, above and under ground. They have an all-hands meeting on the first Monday of each month when they review safety issues and identify potential hazards. Each morning, small groups of workers gather in circles for stretching and warm-up exercises to prevent muscle pulls and other strains during their vigorous work. A unique approach is their reminder to workers on bulletin boards like the one in the photo below. It’s titled, “Why We Work Safe.” It’s plastered with snapshots of the workers’ family members and pets. There is one entertaining exception. One worker posted a picture of his motorcycle. You can see it toward the upper right corner of the bulletin board in the first photo below. I took the second photo of exercising workers on April 21, 2010.

The bulletin board, signs and posters are great for prevention. But even the best prevention program may not eliminate every accident. Therefore, there is a readiness for treatment of accident victims. Here’s an example of such preparation. Medical supplies and other safety equipment hang on the front of the free-standing board, and a gurney is on the back.

Way back, 13 months ago in Update #6, I wrote about Kiewit‘s recycling program. Evidence of it was easy to spot since it was out in the open. But, even now that much of the work is being done underground and out of sight inside the bus terminal, recycling continues to be a top priority. I came across the following sight during my tour last week.

Union Station’s passenger tunnel is familiar to nearly everyone and was the topic of Update #46 and Update #56.  Lesser known is the fact that there are three tunnels behind Union Station: the passenger tunnel, a mail tunnel, and a baggage tunnel.

The passenger tunnel is scheduled for demolition this week. For the past two days, workers have been excavating the area around it.  Below is a distant photo of it taken this afternoon. The parallel slabs of concrete in the center of the photo are on the roof of the tunnel which connects with Union Station near the spot occupied by the green lift.

The mail tunnel still exists, but it was sealed and filled with sand many years ago.  It is a few dozen feet from 16th Street and runs parallel to the passenger tunnel.  Obvious from its name, it was the passageway from a mail cars towed by Amtrak passenger trains to Post Office space in the 16th Street end of Union Station. A related Post Office building was across 16th Street where the EPA building sits today. The recent excavation behind the historic station has exposed part of the mail tunnel making it visible from 16th Street. Here is a photo of it from inside the construction fence.

The baggage tunnel is closer to 18th Street and is parallel to the others. Like the mail tunnel, it has not been used or seen in many years.  Since it is well out of the way of the area to be excavated, it is not expected to be demolished or even revealed during the project.

Today, let’s take a look at how bus exhaust fumes will be removed from inside the terminal.

Remember photos of the plenum as it was being built?  The first photo below taken on October 29, 2010 is a reminder of its appearance while under construction.  In that photo, the plenum is the 10-foot wide passageway between the two parallel concrete walls on the right (hard to pick out).  It acts as the collection point for overhead ducts that remove air from the bus travel lanes that circumvent the passenger waiting area in the center of the terminal.  The second photo is a shot from the inside as it now exists.  The dimensions are approximately 10 feet wide by 20 feet high.  And it’s 200 miles long, or so it seems.

In the first photo above, look carefully at the plenum wall.  You can see a series of rectangular holes along the top of it. In the first photo below, which I took from inside the plenum, notice the grates along the top. They fill the holes you saw in the other photo. Those holes/grates are the entry points into the plenum for the duct work.  The second photo below shows the duct work between the beams in the ceiling of the bus travel lanes in the main part of the terminal.

So far, we’ve seen how the exhaust fumes are collected and delivered to the plenum.  As I mentioned in Friday’s blog, the air will pass from the plenum through filters in one of the mechanical rooms before it is released to the outside.  Here is a rendering showing the above-ground “chimneys”. As you can see in the center of the rendering, there are three of them (nice design, by the way). One is the outlet for the filtered air. One is the intake for fresh air. The other one would be used if there were a fire in the terminal.  Fans would kick into high gear to remove smoke and release it through the third chimney, which would suddenly become a true smoke stack. The chimneys are being cast off-site and will be mounted on the three circles shown in the lower right corner of the following photo that I took on April 18, 2011.

I uploaded 40 photos since last Monday to our Denver Union Station page at JobSiteVistor.com, and I still have a few more to go. After you check them out in the “Weekly Photos” tab, be sure to go to the “Plan View” tab to see time-phased views from various angles starting with the beginning of the project more than a year ago.