Lessons learned from rebuilding the Pentagon after 9/11

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Two years before the 9/11 attacks, the US Department of Defense and the Pentagon’s Office of Renovation had issued a design-build RFP to select a prime contractor to handle a 14-year, fixed-price renovation. It would be the first major renovation of the building since it was built in 1943. The attacks accelerated the project.

The plan called for removing each of the Pentagon’s five wedges to its base structure to remove asbestos and add new mechanical, electrical, plumbing and sprinkler systems, vertical transportation, IT infrastructure, security systems and blast-resistant windows, according to a 20th Anniversary Look Back by the American Society of Civil Engineers.

While many federal RFPs are thousands of pages long, with drawings and design specifications, this proposal was only six pages long. The goal was to give companies bidding on the project an opportunity for innovation, the Design-Build Institute of America says in a description of the effort.

The renewal it covered more than four million square feet and included the total shutdown, demolition and replacement of mechanical and plumbing systems within Wedges 2 through 5, according to Southland Industries, a mechanical design subcontractor that signed off on the project on September 14, 2001, just days after the facility was hit by American Airlines Flight 77. Hensel Phelps was overall design and construction team leader.

The project’s 14-year timeline was shortened to 10 years after the attacks, according to Tim Michael, regional president of Southland, who was on site before and after the attack and for the duration of the project.

To begin with, Southland focused on repairing the damage to wedges 1 and 2, reducing them to their cast-in-place concrete structure as part of the rebuilding effort, known as The Phoenix Project.

“Within a week we mobilized our forces, created a co-located office,” Michael told Facilities Dive. “He was in the helipad. [and then moved to a 20-wide trailer] complex shortly after. We rebuilt the Pentagon from this collaborative workspace [and] there was no waste. All the decision makers who had to make a decision were in this workspace…and they were driving towards a solution, which yes [reoccupying] the outer ring of the Pentagon one year after the event of 09/11/2001”.

The team worked on a phased approach to complete renovations on the remaining building, piece by piece, he said.

Creative programming and workforce planning

The project presented a number of unique challenges. In addition to the low floor-to-floor height, which made it difficult to install systems that depend on ducted air supply, Pentagon officials needed the building to remain occupied without impacting staff and others working during the renovation.

“As part of the design-build RFP we responded to, we were responsible for presenting a schematic-level design of what our solution was,” said Michael. “Our approach to the renovation was to shrink a 6 million square foot facility down to 15,000 square foot increments. We designed an innovative program to take apart, demolish the Pentagon to its original concrete structure and rebuild it in 15,000 square foot increments.”

This reduced schedule accelerated the focus on workforce planning. The project group developed a short-interval production scheduling system, or SIPS, which uses five-day-a-week blocks that were organized to produce a consistent and predictable workflow, according to the Design-Build Institute. The schedule helped provide stability for workers as well as transparency for operators of Pentagon facilities. They could know exactly when they had to be in a certain area on a certain date for the commissioning and training of each team.

“The trick behind any type of SIPS production program is more about the workforce [and] workforce development,” Michael said. “Each trade had one to two weeks to do their work within that 15,000 square feet. We used the weekends as buffer time.”

At certain peak resource levels, the team could put in a 15,000-square-foot area and do it between Monday and Friday, and not a day before, “because if you finished on Thursday, you had nowhere to go because your next phase of work started the following Monday,” Michael said.

The tight schedule provided the team with manpower and job certainty “around how many resources are actually needed once we started stacking up the different renovations that were going on at any given time,” he said. It effectively took the peaks and valleys out of the workforce plan and allowed the team to attract the right talent and build a quality workforce that could perform the same task, day in and day out, for 10 years, Michael said.

He also praised the project’s integrated delivery method and its ability to bring stakeholders together. The project used what the team called a big room, an environment set up to have all the major trades involved in the project, as well as the owner, make decisions as a team on the fly and tend to cost and schedule, he said.

“For me, there’s no other way to deliver a project other than a collaborative mindset,” Michael said, acknowledging that they were in a unique situation. “Not every project has the capacity to hold a helipad or a 20-wide trailer complex and put all the decision makers in there,” he said.

Pentagon officials also wanted LEED certification, which required that environmental, indoor and outdoor ventilation and energy efficiency elements be incorporated.

Southland was creative in its approach, according to Curt Eisenhower, a principal engineer at Southland Industries who was involved in the project. The team used fan-powered induction units, or FPIUs, along with chilled water cooling coils and an air valve to supply a constant flow of outdoor air conditioning, which allowed the team to raise the ceiling 23 inches to hide the systems in bulkheads and increase natural lighting in the space, the company says.

The project ended up being a pilot for LEED for renovations, “allowing Southland to work hand-in-hand with LEED to help set the standards for similar facilities in the future,” Eisenhower said in an email.

A quality RFP sets the stage

From the RFP through the design process and construction phase, Pentagon officials and the renovation team created a stage with creative, incentive-based contracts that allowed design partners to create, innovate and deliver the best solution, Michael said. “We see it as the Nirvana state: when we have an owner sophisticated enough to understand that we’re not going to hamstring or limit our design partners and our construction partners by being prescriptive in the RFP,” he said.

“They really brought it up. Safety, schedule, cost, behavior and cost management were some of the five KPIs that we managed to drive the right behaviors,” said Michael. Clearly defining what’s most valuable in a project’s RFP can help ensure the work gets done on time and under budget, he said.

“We get asked quite regularly what is the best style of contract to use, and I give it some thought,” he said. “That brought it back to the execution side of the business and allowed us, instead of going through a P6-type programming effort where we had 15,000 lines programmed for each Pentagon wedge, we got it down to a single 11-by-17 sheet. The people in the field who were building understood where they needed to be on a daily and weekly basis.”

That method, along with the ability to co-locate a team of decision-makers who understood the end game — in this case, repairing and renovating the Pentagon ahead of schedule and under budget — were driving factors in the project’s success, he said.

“One of the things I really push on any project is to make sure we understand it [how] the owner defines the value and what the desired end state is. Then we design our solution backwards from there,” Michael said. “These are a couple of shots that I took from that day, that year … and I took it forward.”