The Public Safety Building in Whittier has begun construction and is expected to be completed in May 2017.
The Public Safety Building’s construction site, as seen from the roof of Whittier’s Public Works Building known as P12.
By Marc Donadieu
Glacier City Gazette
In the winter of 2011-12, Snowpacalypse struck Whittier. The inordinately heavy snowfall kept falling and accumulating. Eventually the weight of it all damaged the roof of the Public Works Building, known as P12 due to its military origins. This event was the beginning of a long process that led to the current construction of the Public Safety Building.
To better understand the project, the Gazette was given a tour of the construction site and the old building and granted interviews with City Manager Mark Lynch and Moe Zamarron, Project Manager for the Public Service Facility Construction Project.
Construction began in May, has recently been pushed back to a May 2017 completion date. The building is expected to be operational for 50 to 100 years, as it is being built much stronger than required by code to endure the rigors it will face.
The structure is designed to withstand heavy winds and strong earthquakes as well as the next Snowpacalypse. Whittier receives a lot of snow, so the building will be able to bear a 300-pound per square foot snow load.
“That’s a heck of a lot of weight at 17,000 square feet,” Zamarron said. “I think it’s probably in the teens of height. It’s a lot.”
The entrance will be right across from The Anchor Inn. The Public Safety Department will be on the ground floor just after entering. After passing through on right, there will be a large bay used as a storage area housing all the apparatus for fire, ambulance and police. The first level will also contain the Whittier Fire Department, which will include a day room, kitchen and offices. On other side will be the Public Works area to keep snow removal equipment and gear.
The completed building will be 34,000 square feet. Phase 1 will lay the foundation and construct the first floor at a cost of $6 million. Phase 2 will construct the second floor and add 17,000 square feet for public works storage, city offices and other undetermined possibilities. The city is getting ready to execute the design for this part of the project that will be completed in later years. Phase 3 will build council chambers on the third floor. The latter phases are expected to cost about another $1 million.
There are a number of possibilities up for discussion about what to do with P12 when the departments move into the new building next door. Options include leasing it, selling it or taking it down.
“It looks like it has a lot of potential,” Zamarron said, “and there has been interest in doing something with it. I doubt it gets torn down, but that won’t be my call. People can easily image boats being repaired here. There will be a lot of uses for this building if somebody wanted it.”
The 60-year old P12 was built in 1956 by the military. The roof now has heavy wooden support beams shoring it up due to damage from weight of snow over the years. The protective membrane was damaged too but fixed.
“To bring this building up to code and usable conditions would probably run more than the cost of the new building,” Zamarron said, “so when you start looking at what is it taking up plus heating this place, I heard an estimate about $5,000 a month.”
The day of the Gazette’s visit, a vast amount of structural concrete was poured to create footers, the massive base that forms an anchor where the steel is bolted. It takes seven days for the concrete to be dry enough to start building on top of it. The footers will keep the new building stable during heavy snow or a strong earthquake.
“These footers are huge,” Zamarron said. “One of the footers had 158 cubic yards of concrete. The weight of that thing is 150 tons. The first day they poured 250 yards and Alaska Sand and Gravel said that was the largest pour they had ever, even including stuff in Anchorage. We’re going to be looking at 500 hundred yards of concrete, roughly speaking, in the foundation.”
The whole building was barged up from Utah recently. It consisted of 16 truck loads, weighed 250 tons and cost $110,000 to ship. It was heavy due to the structural requirements and amount of steel to be used in the structure. The building’s base just started being assembled when construction workers began bolting steel.
The interview with City Manager Lynch took place in one of the large bays inside P12. Since the Internet was down due to a part malfunction, Lynch was unable to work in his office. He chose to make use of the unexpected time by putting rebuilt diesel injectors in the engine of a skid-steer, a small loader with a front bucket and pallet forks currently used to build trails.
“I’m down here working on a diesel engine,” Lynch said. “We don’t have Internet. Everything is down, so I figured I might as well come down and do something. I did everything I could think to do in the office that I didn’t need Internet for. I had a skid-steer sitting there, so I can fix it for our Parks and Rec folks to use.”
Lynch explained that after Snowpacalypse struck, Whittier received a half million-dollar grant from the state to use to fix P12’s roof. As they started working on it, they realized it was beyond fixing. The city used the $300,000 remainder of the grant and received another $2 million from state to start the design process for a new Public Service Facility.
“Everything else, the city has funded either from local reserves or from CVP, which is cruise ship passenger tax,” Lynch said. “We get about $800,000 in cruise ship passenger tax, and they have been saving that up for a number of years. Right now, they’ve got $3.5 million of that designated to the building. One of the uses for cruise ship money is public safety.”
Whittier has two ambulances that run almost every day in the summer all day long. It’s mostly tourists and cruise ship passengers who need the service, and sometimes they need to go to Anchorage for treatment or to the medical examiner.
“It’s not uncommon to get deceased in,” Lynch said, “and they take those to Anchorage with the ambulance. For a community of 200, one ambulance that would leave town maybe 20 times a year would be plenty. Instead, I think we make in excess of 300 ambulance runs to Anchorage because of the cruise ships.”
Lynch also gave some numbers to show how 700,000 people visit the small community. In addition to cruise passengers who make up the majority of visitors, Whittier has the second busiest marine highway terminal in the state beside Juneau. The Anton Anderson Tunnel tracks how many people go into Whittier and as many as 2,500 visitors pass through on a busy day. On busy weekends, about 1,000 boats come in and out of harbors, and about half of those people are from Anchorage.
Whittier’s residents don’t require all of the police, fire and EMS services the city has available, yet they are in place because of the need to deal with the seasonal influx of visitors. Without them, the city would only need a full time officer and a part time officer for the community, but during the summer it has five officers. At the end of the summer, some of these officers are laid off. If Whittier and Girdwood are able to agree on a policing contract, those officers could be working full time serving both communities.
This article was sponsored in part by Kenai Mountain-Turnagain Arm National Heritage Area.
