STORY CONTACT: Norm Yandt, (208) 885-7358, normy@uidaho.edu
MEDIA CONTACT: Bill Loftus, (208) 885-7694, bloftus@uidaho.edu

Work on the University of Idaho’s $11.5 million Agricultural Biotechnology Facility is down to the nitty-gritty as construction crews work on an innovative foundation system.

The schedule calls for Ormond Builders of Idaho Falls to complete the project by mid-December 2000. The new building is part of an overall $16 million project to improve UI agriculture buildings and laboratories.

With construction in progress, the next step will be selection of a final bid for the laboratory casework, cabinets and other equipment to complete the 20 laboratories in the new building.

The new three-story building will provide 45,000 square feet of laboratory and office space equipped to allow UI researchers to use the most modern methods and equipment in their work.

The building’s innovative foundation will use geopiers, which will take the place of a typical piling foundation system. Geopiers are 30-inch diameter holes bored eight to 10 feet deep that are filled with carefully compacted gravel. Geopiers will be located precisely at more than 100 selected points to support the building foundation.

Widely used elsewhere, geopiers are new to Inland Northwest construction projects, according to Norm Yandt, UI project manager.

The schedule calls for foundation work to be completed by late January. In early February, the structural steel forming the building’s framework will begin taking shape and should be complete by March, Yandt said.

The new building’s external brick walls and windows will be complete by June, according to the schedule. Yandt said the building will appear essentially complete by late September, with landscaping in place by late October.

The final two months before the mid-December completion of the building will be devoted to finishing the buildings heating and ventilation systems and other mechanical systems.

The initial phases of construction began two months ago. They included an archaeological survey of the building site, which is on the north side of the college’s main buildings at Sixth and Rayburn streets.

The survey gathered information about the previous building that occupied the site, the Campus Club, a men’s dormitory that burned down in May 1958. The spectacular finals-week fire did not result in any injuries.

Other preliminary tasks included the relocation of utility lines through the area. Still ahead is the relocation of a 13,000-volt underground power line. The power line work will affect three major campus buildings including the existing agriculture buildings and Renfrew Hall, which houses the Chemistry Department.

The power line work must be planned carefully with advance notice to avoid disrupting experiments and was scheduled for later in December after students complete final exams, Yandt said.

The project has been nearly a decade in the making. The first phase, a $1 million campus aquaculture lab, was completed in May 1991. Other parts of the project include a $1.75 million aquaculture lab at the Hagerman Fish Culture Experiment Station and a $1.7 million renovation of 1951 and 1974 agriculture buildings on campus.

Funding for the project is split nearly equally between state, federal and private support. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service is the source of federal funding for the project.