And, as far as Doubt is concerned, leaving the old facility behind and moving into a new “smart,” energy-efficient building can’t come fast enough.
“It was originally built for around 300 people and now there’s 600 in this building,” he said. Not only is the facility crammed, but its age also has caused structural fatigue. “Everybody’s so close together. The air conditioning system doesn’t work, the heating system doesn’t work, and to be forced to work in that kind of environment day-in and day-out is just depressing.”
The nine-story building has water damage, sewage leaks have reached 911 computers and evidence storage, and the site was rated not functionally survivable in an earthquake. Daylight doesn’t reach many offices, and cramped cubicles and broken windows produce a sullen atmosphere.
The problems have prompted Mayor Ralph Becker’s administration to take action, but the solution goes far beyond creating bigger space and better power. Salt Lake City leaders are constructing an earthquake-resistant, energy-efficient building that’s intended to produce minimally at least as much emissions-free renewable energy as it consumes.
In addition to police and fire, the new building will house: 911 emergency communication services; emergency operations and management staff; and IT, telecommunications and voice radio systems.
Officials have branded the facility as Salt Lake City’s “net zero energy public safety building,” the inbound administrative headquarters for the police and fire departments, as well as the emergency operations and 911 centers. According to the U.S. Energy Department, net zero buildings produce as much energy as they use over the course of a year.
Innovation With a Green Touch
Salt Lake City plans to have the new public safety building completed by summer 2013. Although the facility’s far from complete, taxpayers can preview what they’re getting from renderings and videos on the city website. Images of angular glass walls, sleek metallic surfaces, verdant flora and expansive indoor and outdoor spaces give impressions of a futuristic community square, not a hub for tense criminal investigations and disaster management operations.
The city partnered with construction and engineering firms, including MOCA Systems, GSBS Architects and Dunn Associates, for the project. Their four-story, 168,000-square-foot marvel is designed to benefit both citizens and the professionals tasked with protecting them. The building’s attributes include:
- Salt Lake City’s data center;
- two underground parking levels in addition to the four above ground;
- an outdoor public plaza and festival space for city events;
- rooms for community CPR classes and other safety training;
- an atrium lobby where citizens can research police records, drop off expired prescription drugs and interact with police and fire headquarters; and
- a museum focused on the history of Salt Lake City’s police and fire departments.
GSBS engineer Curtis Clark said Salt Lake City solicited proposals from companies to install a 314-kilowatt solar array on the roof that will generate 420,000 kilowatt-hours per year in photovoltaic energy. To put that number into perspective, in 2010, the average home used about 11,500 kilowatt-hours, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
The city is bidding out an additional installation at an offsite landfill for extra power but hasn’t decided whether it will be a 720, 1,000 or 1,300 kilowatt array. It’s estimated that this extra array will generate up to 2 million kilowatt-hours a year in solar energy.
The solar arrays are intended to supply off-the-grid power during catastrophes to essential functions like the EOC and data center.
If successful, they could be a gateway to more deployment in Salt Lake City’s future. “This is kind of the pilot program for the city to see how realistic it is to make that happen for other areas,” said Chad Jones, MOCA’s project manager for the net zero energy building.
Other energy-efficiency measures will include:
- a solar water heating system;
- desktop energy monitoring technology;
- occupancy sensors that automatically turn devices on or off depending on the absence or presence of people in areas; and
- an additional solar array atop an outdoor man-made canopy that will cover a walkway to the building entrance and provide outlets for citizens to charge their mobile gadgets.
Built to Last
The Wasatch fault is a vertical motion fault running through Salt Lake City, and it’s always a potential seismic threat. Consequently, project leaders designed the building to withstand a magnitude 7.3 earthquake or weaker. They want disaster management pros to be able to continue working during the quakes.
“There’s no other building in Utah that meets those standards where, if there is an earthquake, employees can turn around and walk directly back into the building, turn on their computers and start working immediately,” Jones said.
Construction plans include progressive collapse resistance. Progressive collapse describes a scenario where one structural element fails and collapses, leading to other elements collapsing, much like a falling house of cards. In Salt Lake City’s case, engineers installed steel frame connection technology, from the company SidePlate, that enhances the building’s ductility and integrity when shock waves ripple through. Additionally, bracers in the walls contain viscous dampers with fluid and moving pistons inside them that absorb seismic energy.
“If there’s one column that is taken out from a blast or an earthquake, the structural system is designed in a way that it cannot progress through the building and bring other columns down,” Jones said. “The wave will not be able to pass through.”
Cory Lyman, the city’s emergency management director, thinks that an earthquake is Utah’s greatest disaster risk. However, the new building’s off-the-grid power supply will come in handy if a quake destroys his department’s access to traditional power sources.
“Our inability to get power from the power company and how long our backup generation capabilities will work for us — those are all impacted for the positive by having the zero footprint building,” Lyman said.
The Road to Change
Salt Lake City’s administration has made great strides to get this far with the project, but the journey hasn’t been smooth. In 2007 before Becker took office, the government created a $192 million bond measure to replace the current building, but it failed narrowly. However, Becker succeeded in 2009 with a less expensive measure.
“We ended up going back to the voters two years later, asking for a $125 million bond and fortunately, it passed,” Langan said. “I think it was over 70 percent of the vote, so it was a really good margin. Since that time, we have just been working on getting the building built.”
Langan belongs to the new public safety building’s steering committee, and she said they originally aimed for LEED certification with the construction, but the mayor challenged them to go further and attain a net zero energy emissions status.
The team looked to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Colorado for inspiration. NREL’s staff completed a 220,000-square-foot energy-efficient research facility that
incorporated sustainable elements like daylighting, evaporative cooling and wind energy. Salt Lake City’s public safety building steering committee met with NREL’s people to learn lessons.
The new building could save the government money. Today when the city repairs problems with the current building, the expensive work threatens to exhaust municipal resources. Annual maintenance costs exceeded $650,000 annually as of November 2009, approximately 70 percent more than for similar local buildings. These days, facility repairs would be so expensive that the
city prefers not to spend the money unless the repair would prevent a deadly failure of some kind.
“The building we’re in now is terrible,” Doubt said. “The employees are all excited to move.”
The first floor houses divisions that interact with the public; the second floor’s for investigations; the third floor is home to 24-hour operations units like dispatch, emergency operations and IT; and police and fire administration offices will share the fourth floor to facilitate better collaboration between departments.
It will be a more productive alternative to the current layout, where police and fire business is spread across multiple floors and buildings.
