Pentagon marks end of 18-year renovation

The Defense Department spent nearly $4 billion over the last two decades to replace every square foot of the building\'s interior. Officials expect the project ...

By Jared Serbu
Reporter
Federal News Radio

The Pentagon marked the end of $4 billion renovation that stretched for nearly two decades and will provide for another 50 years of service, leaders said at a ceremony Wednesday.

The Pentagon renovation was one of the largest, most complex building renovations ever completed. The 18-year project took a long time, measured against the less than two years it took to build the Pentagon in the first place in the early 1940s. Nonetheless, it was an impressive feat, building managers argue.

“This project—removing all the hazardous material, replacing all the building systems, the elevators, the escalators, all the telecommunications—it was all done in the context of an aggressive renovation schedule,” said Michael Rhodes, the Pentagon’s director of administration and management. “It was all done in the context of still managing the program costs and keeping it under budget. IT was all done in the context of a very wide range of tenant IT and security requirements, and it was all done in the context of keeping this nation’s military headquarters operational 24 hours a day, seven days a week for all the occupants and all the leadership of this department.”

Although the iconic building looks the same on the outside, there’s virtually nothing left of the Roosevelt-era interior. DoD gutted all 6.5 million square feet of space in the building and rebuilt it in sections.

After 50 years of continuous use, officials convinced Congress to create a fund to start renovating the building in the early 1990s, said William Brazis, director of DoD’s Washington Headquarters Services. He described a building that, back then, was filled with rats, asbestos, crumbling pipes and ancient electrical wiring that gave way to multiple power outages on a daily basis.

“The offices were, on the main, poorly lit,” he said. “Cords, wires and pipes were often rigged to make things work—mostly. Electrical outlets and breakers failed frequently. Localized outages were a daily event. The building was certainly not well postured for the coming of the computer age. Windows were either sealed shut after 40 years of rust and paint, or they were jammed open as a result of failed mechanisms. The air was often stale from poor ventilation, not to mention the consequence of over 50 years of heavy smoking in this building.”

One of the last straws came as U.S. troops were preparing to enter Kuwait for the first gulf war in 1990.

“A small fire broke out in the area of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” Brazis said. “A firefighter pressurized a deteriorated water pipe, and hundreds of thousands of gallons of water flooded into this building, flooding approximately 300,000 square feet of basement space. It nearly caused the Army and Air Force operations centers to shut down, because the rising waters in the high voltage area really led us to fear for electrocution. The largest military deployment since the Vietnam war, and the United States military command center was about to be half operational.”

Fortunately, he said, someone found a shutoff valve just in time and prevented the shutdown. But the building still was flooded with water and mud a foot deep.

Brazis said before the renovation projects started, security procedures at the Pentagon also looked dramatically different than they do today.

“Anyone at that time could walk right into the concourse and shop,” he said. “Each day scores of trucks backed directly, unimpeded, to the south side of the building at the loading docks. Hundreds of buses ran directly under the building at the concourse.”

The building renovation and several ancillary projects over the last decade dramatically changed access to the Pentagon. The Washington Area Metropolitan Transit Authority rebuilt and relocated the Pentagon train station—the old station led train passengers directly into the interior of the Pentagon. Bus stops were moved farther away from the building walls. Blast proof glass was installed on the building’s exterior. DoD also built a remote shipping and receiving facility to screen deliveries before they ultimately made their way into the building. That facility handles more than 200 trucks per day.

Rhodes said the inside of the building also saw major safety improvements.

“The sprinkler systems, the blast-resistant windows, the photo-luminescent signage. On the capabilities side, the IT infrastructure has been built-in,” he said. “And I think it’s amazing, but this project so far has received seven of the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED awards. Two of those were at the silver level, and I’m pretty confident an eighth one’s on its way as we get the fifth and last wedge certified.”

The wedges are the five sections of the building the department renovated, one by one. Each time, they had to move a fifth of the Pentagon’s workforce to temporary remote offices in other parts of Arlington, Va. The wedge would be sealed off, and crews would go to work using what officials say was an assembly line approach to short interval construction, breaking each wedge into 10,000 square foot increments. Each trade group got just five days to finish their work before moving onto another piece of the wedge.

“What still remains etched in my mind as the most amazing aspect was being able to walk behind those barrier walls,” he said. “While this entire building was operating with 20,000 people continuing to do the business of this nation’s security, people were tearing this building down to its core and then building it back up, prepared for a dynamic and challenging future.”

Pentagon officials say they designed the workspaces to be as generic as possible, with modular components that can be reconfigured for the needs of future workers.

That, and the other improvements, lead building managers to think their renovations will make the Pentagon last another 50 years before another overhaul.

“It is more capable,” Rhodes said. “It is more secure and more survivable. It has a modern IT infrastructure—I don’t know how far that will take us, we know how quickly things change, but certainly it’s postured for the future.”

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