WATERBURY — On Aug. 28, 2011, Tropical Storm Irene began flooding state employees out of their Waterbury offices and psychiatric patients out of their beds.
Three years later, steel beams three stories tall prop up faded brick walls from a courtyard. A mason fills ground-level windows with oversized granite blocks.
The $95 million project — $125 million with design fees and other project costs factored in — started with demolition of 15 buildings a year ago.
Low-lying land near the Winooski River, where office buildings and a boiler plant once stood, now is sloped for stormwater runoff and has been seeded with grass. Pickup trucks, cranes and cement mixers track a dirt lane that soon will be built into a paved road about six feet higher.
Project manager Mike Stevens said on a tour of the site Tuesday that when the decision was made to rebuild at the same location, architects reconfigured the sprawling facility. New construction will be built closer to the quarter-mile long historic corridor, and on higher ground, to withstand a 500-year flood.
The state also weighed the feasibility of moving to the Barre-Montpelier area, Stevens said, or alternatively repairing the buildings and moving back in.
Most of the site was uninhabitable after the flood, so employees for the Agency of Human Services and other state offices fanned out to temporary locations. The Agency of Natural Resources permanently relocated to the National Life complex in Montpelier.
A new state psychiatric hospital opened in Berlin in July.
Moving all the state functions outside of Waterbury would have devastated the town, Stevens said.
“I think there was only one choice, and it was what we’ve done here,” Stevens said. “The other (options) would have abandoned a community in Vermont. If you’re industry, you can make that decision. But as a government, I don’t think you can do that to a subsection of your people.”
Tearing down to build up
At one point, the state office complex in Waterbury accommodated about 1,370 workers, Stevens said, though by the time of the flood the workforce had declined to about 1,200. The Department of Public Safety’s forensics laboratory, with about 160 employees, escaped major damage. The lab’s operations have continued on-site with little interruption.
About 15 buildings have come down. Selective destruction is about 75 percent complete in the 120,000-square foot “historic core,” where the former state hospital was built in the 1890s, Stevens said.
The iron structure of a new 86,000-square-foot office building, which includes two 35-person and one 90-person conference rooms, is “substantially complete,” Stevens said.
A monolithic parking lot will replace several smaller lots. The “Walmart-style” lot is not his favorite part of the aesthetic, but the layout will make it easier for employees to find a spot, Stevens said.
And a 20,000-square-foot central utility plant will bring the site into the 21st century. The plant will run off biomass — wood chips most likely.
Stevens predicts it will take up to four months for all AHS employees to move in, which is on track to start at the end of 2015.
Technically, the entire site is considered a historic district, Stevens said.
All but one of the remaining historic buildings will be totally modernized with insulation, efficient windows, energy recovery units, a central cooling system and modern data infrastructure.
Though the historic corridor is only about 400 yards long, Stevens said, all the “nooks and crannies” add up to triple that length.
To lessen the possibility of damage from future floods, the basements which housed a tunnel system will be filled in with a light-weight cementitious material, and topped with more concrete and stone.
The Center Building, where the state hospital’s doctor once lived, is undergoing a total historic restoration to create a snapshot of the era in which the state complex began. An entrance road is being diverted to make way for a reproduction porte-cochère.
Stevens said the design process was a series of negotiations that balances the demands of many masters. The value of historic preservation had to be weighed against environmental considerations. The needs of the town were balanced against the urgency of getting government offices back up and running. All of it had to be done within an affordable budget.
Stevens, who worked on projects of this scope at the University of Vermont and Fletcher Allen Health Care, said his favorite part of overseeing site operations is translating the needs of one party to another.
“It was a balancing act,” Stevens said.
Click on an image to start slideshow.
