Onward and Upward

Published in Piling Industry Canada Magazine 2009:
The 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week airport at the end of Wellington Avenue in northwest Winnipeg remains bustling even as it undergoes the most momentous transition in its history.

A new four-level parkade is up and providing vehicle accommodation north of the 45-year-old terminal building while, just north of the parkade, there’s a hum of activity as construction of the old terminal’s replacement continues. Elsewhere, a bus depot is under construction, as is a utilities building. And a sign at the airport property’s outskirts proclaims the future home of a mail-sorting facility, itself under construction.

As cars, vans and trucks pass by on the way to dropping off and picking up airline passengers, workers are in the process of turning about 4,500 tonnes of steel, more than 12,000 cubic metres of concrete and sundry other ingredients into a shiny new landmark for the gateway to Canada’s West.

Winnipeg’s international airport is being transformed – modernized and augmented, if you will – with a gleaming new terminal building that will be about one-third bigger than what it replaces.

The existing terminal was built in 1962-64 after continuous post-war growth in air travel. At the time, approximately 600,000 passengers used the airport annually. Ever-increasing passenger traffic prompted the terminal’s expansion in 1984. Passenger volumes have followed an upward trend in the 25 years since, with a notable dip following the September 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States. Passenger traffic was down in the first quarter of 2009, too – probably a blip due to the global recession.

The need for a bigger airport was obvious before the 20th century made its final bow, and became more pressing as the millennium grew older. In 2008, for example, the airport hosted 3.5 million passengers, a 28 per cent increase from 2000 and 50 per cent more than in 1995. Cargo loads rose 44 per cent from 2000 to 2008, to 150,000 tonnes.

Renamed James Armstrong Richardson International Airport in December 2006, the facility is Canada’s seventh-busiest airport.

Passenger volume is projected to reach 4.1 million by 2015 and 4.6 million by 2020. Cargo tonnage is expected to increase as well, and there are about a million visits annually by people accompanying passengers to the airport or meeting passengers post-flight. All of these statistics from the Winnipeg Airports Authority (WAA) point to a need for more and bigger facilities.

Accommodation by design

The WAA contracted Pelli Clarke Pelli and Associates as “master architect” to design the new 51,000-square-metre terminal in collaboration with Stantec Architecture (the building’s “prime architect”).

That’s Pelli as in Cesar Pelli, an Argentina-born but New York-based architect who has made his mark on urban skylines with such notable landmarks as the Wells Fargo Centre skyscraper in Minneapolis, the Wachovia Center office tower in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and the 452-metre Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The Petronas towers are the world’s tallest twin buildings and were the world’s two tallest buildings for several years until 2004, when they were surpassed by an office tower in Taiwan.

While he’s most famous for skyscrapers, the 82-year-old Pelli also has some notable airport terminals in his portfolio. Terminals B and C at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport were designed by him, as were Terminal 2 of Tokyo’s Haneda airport and the TWA terminal building at New York’s Kennedy airport.

Pelli visited the Winnipeg airport and surveyed the area to get a feel for the project before getting to work on designing the new building, says WAA spokesperson Christine Alongi, adding that the new building “has been conceived as a signature building connecting (Winnipeg) with the rest of the world.”

Besides being bigger to meet the needs of an increasingly busy airport, the emerging new terminal is also touted to improve “customer wayfinding” (i.e., people’s ability to get around within its space and find the things they seek), the range of concession services (restaurants and stores), and customs processing for international travellers. It’s also designed for universal accessibility, so that passengers with disabilities can access services with ease.

The building is designed to meet the criteria for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification from the Canadian Green Building Council. Extensive use of natural light will cut electricity consumption by reducing the need for artificial lighting. At the same time, windows will cut cooling costs in the warmer months by reflecting excess sunlight away.

Another important component of the terminal’s “green” design is its waste-heat recovery system. Waste heat in the central utilities building’s boiler operations will be captured, as will heat from the main computer and server rooms, for reuse in the hot-water system for heating the new terminal building.

That’s pretty impressive, but there’s more. “An advanced electrical demand management system will sense and turn on what’s needed, then sense and turn off what’s not needed—for example, by turning off each baggage carousel when all luggage has been removed, rather than staying in motion until someone notices that equipment is being used for no purpose and manually shutting down machinery,” says Alongi.

Everybody benefits from the terminal’s LEED-worthy design, says WAA project manager Lloyd McGinnis.

“From an energy point of view, this is a very efficient facility,” he says. “Though it’s a much larger facility than the existing terminal, the projections are that in fact it will use less energy than the existing terminal. Everybody benefits from that, because that means less charges to the air companies, and if there’s less charges to them, ticket prices can be lower and so on.

“From the environmental point of view, we’re learning every day that the more environmentally conscious we are, the more efficient we are.”

A big job like the new terminal building, with all those tonnes of steel and concrete, demands a thorough and careful approach to foundation work. “The approach to piling was based on proven professional methods with a significant degree of planning in advance to make the process smooth, predictable and productive,” Alongi remarks.

Subterranean (Manitoba) Ltd., a company based in West St. Paul, Manitoba, that’s been in the foundation business for about 60 years, was hired as the project’s foundation subcontractor. Subterranean’s recent work includes the new water treatment plant being built east of Winnipeg, the recently completed Manitoba Hydro building in the city’s downtown, and the MTS Centre hockey arena. It has also landed the foundation contract for the future Canadian Museum for Human Rights.

Hundreds of precast and cast-in-place piles and caissons were used. The precast driven piles are approximately eight inches wide and 30-plus feet deep. The depth of drilled, cast-in-place caissons varies depending on depth of bearing strata, with size ranging from three to 14 feet in diameter.

All piles are custom designed to support specific loads, following a design made in accordance with current national building codes. Piles are driven until a specified resistance is met. Caissons were founded on a very dense till layer with a high bearing capacity. Both straight-shaft and belled caissons were used. Till/hardpan was relatively consistent at a depth of approximately 30 feet.

On track for 2010

On a cool spring day, the labours of building a new terminal continue as car and truck traffic provides an ambient soundtrack to the changes underway. The project, managed by Winnipeg-based Wardrop Engineering and California-headquartered Parsons Corporation, is on track for completion in 2010.

“I think it has gone well under the circumstances of the contractors having been plagued by labour shortages along the way, and then we have not had the kindest weather in the last two winters,” the WAA’s McGinnis remarks as the work proceeds.

“They’ve had some setbacks because of weather but even in spite of the very severe winter that we’ve had this year, a tremendous amount of work took place around and within the air terminal.

“The biggest challenge for everybody in this area over the last two and a half years has been labour shortages,” he adds. “Everybody went to Alberta and B.C. … But at the moment we have about 420 people working on the air terminal itself almost every day. That has picked up from, say, 300 last summer.”

Official groundbreaking for the redevelopment program took place September 15, 2005, with Winnipeg Mayor Sam Katz and Manitoba Transportation Minister Ron Lemieux among the dignitaries on hand.

A four-level, 1,600-stall parkade (also home to car-rental outlets) was constructed in 2006 by PCL Constructors, doubling the number of parking spaces at the airport. A pedestrian bridge between the parkade and the terminal is to be completed this year.

South of the parkade, on Powerhouse Road, the airport’s new central utilities building (CUB) nears completion. McGinnis says the CUB was “about 90 per complete” by early May and expects it to be finished before the leaves change colour this year.

Redevelopment’s other main components, aside from the terminal building, parkade and CUB, are what McGinnis refers to as “airside” (runways, aprons, etc., for the airlines) and “groundside” (roadways, walkways and the like). He says the former was 90 per cent done as of early May, and the latter will be mostly completed by autumn.

Total cost of the entire redevelopment program – terminal building, parkade, roadways and all – has been pegged at $585 million. The terminal building itself will cost about $270 million. The budget has remained essentially unchanged despite pressures in the labour and materials markets. And it’s all funded through an Airport Improvement Fee applied to every passenger boarding a flight at the airport.

One of the most significant challenges has been building in the middle of a busy, 24-hour-a-day airport, says Alongi. “A prime focus has been maintaining current airport terminal and parking activities with minimal disruption to passengers or other customers. As a result, it has been necessary to isolate construction to the maximum degree possible away from the public.”

Contractors in the airport redevelopment program’s various components include Man-Shield Construction, PCL Constructors Canada, Nelson River Construction, Mulder Construction, McCaine Electric and Otis Elevators.

General contractor for the terminal building is EllisDon Corporation, which was awarded the contract in 2007 after a competitive bidding process in which a variety of criteria was applied to determine the bidder offering the best value. EllisDon selected Subterranean for the foundation work.