The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) Andrews Federal Center Bus Garage serves as a major hub for WMATA’s heavy bus operations in the Washington, D.C. region, including the District of Columbia and its Maryland and Virginia suburbs. The garage has more than 100 bays for fueling, repairing and even painting buses. The facility also provides ample office space for WMATA employees.

At the time of the contract signing, the Andrews Federal Center Bus Garage was Shapiro & Duncan’s largest Design-Build project, originally valued at roughly $21 million. Making this job even more unique is the fact that it is not only the first large-scale industrial facility that Shapiro & Duncan has designed and worked on, but also our first foray into large scale mechanical and plumbing solutions for a transit bus facility.

Any design build project poses a challenge because it requires taking design requirements from the owner, turning them into a constructible deliverable and then actually building what is designed. In this case, our team was breaking new ground by designing mechanical and plumbing systems for our first large scale industrial. Another challenge was taking design requirements that had been used on older WMATA vehicle platforms and bridging them to the agency’s current equipment performance (e.g., hybrid bus engines). For example, the RFP documents lacked detailed requirements on the Owner’s compressed air needs which resulted in the system being upsized significantly.

Posing another challenge was a 529-day delay in the start of the project. The site originally chosen by WMATA was under an EPA moratorium because the site’s infrastructure was overtaxed environmentally. Because of that, permits could not be obtained from Prince Georges County, Md. and the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission (WSSC). Before our team could start work, several major renovations by WSSC had to be performed at waste water pumping stations to avoid allowing effluent to make its way into the environment.

Stopping and starting a mechanical systems project always creates challenges – even more so when the project is Design-Build. In Design-Build mode, it helps when construction occurs at a continuing pace, which allows the design team to make fluid changes on the fly.