“The level-three facility must not be thought of as just a collection of building systems,” says Ole Sorensen, head of the biology section at Alberta Agriculture, Food & Rural Development. “It is a single large machine – a very complex, very expensive machine that is built to do containment. Having the electrical or HVAC or any other building system fail means the whole thing fails--leaving you with a very expensive level-two facility, or worse yet, a building that is completely unusable.”

Sorensen speaks from experience. Throughout the construction of a recently completed $14-million CL3 facility in Alberta, Sorensen witnessed firsthand a number of the pitfalls that can easily occur in projects of this type.

A Fast-Track Project

With approximately 6,900 sf under CL3 containment, the new facility, located in Edmonton, includes three labs, dedicated rooms for microscopy and tissue culture, and animal facilities. (The building’s total area of 29,440 sf includes extensive support areas required to enable the containment area.) The facility will facilitate foreign animal disease response preparedness and surveillance and host research into agriculturally significant group 3 pathogens.

Although the Food Safety Division of Alberta Agriculture and Food had long recognized the need for a CL3 facility in Alberta, detection of mad cow disease and avian influenza in the region motivated the government of Alberta to fund the project. Once funding was secured, the design process was begun, and completed, on a fast track.

“Design can be done very quickly when you have a dedicated group of individuals who are knowledgeable and committed to getting it done,” says Sorensen. “We certainly had the right people at the table to make sure this design was done the right way and done very quickly.”

Prior to completion of construction documents, the design was reviewed by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. The design also underwent a third-party review.

“We wanted to make sure that we weren’t missing something very essential in the design,” he says.

Specifications were then put together, the project was tendered, and ground was broken—all in the space of 12 months following project conception.

“It was very quick all the way along the line,” says Sorensen.

Lessons Learned

Flexibility proved essential to project success. The design team’s mandate from the Ministers of Agriculture was to develop a CL3 facility that could accommodate all types of testing that were then occurring, respond to all of Alberta Agriculture and Food’s possible needs for the foreseeable future, and accommodate CL3 research by the University of Alberta or the Alberta Research Council—in other words, to create a highly flexible, generically designed facility.

Because the Agri-Food Laboratories Branch (AFLB) was not conducting any CL3 research when the program review and design were initiated, estimating future CL3 containment needs was particularly difficult—making flexibility all the more important. When a decision was made to accommodate BSE testing—performed at the time in a crowded enhanced-CL2 laboratory—in the new facility, the flexibility of the initial design allowed the program to evolve further into two labs, one for BSE testing and one for future CL3 testing and research.

Scheduling, however, proved more problematic. The owner of the project, Alberta Infrastructure and Transportation (AIT), had never overseen the construction of a veterinary CL3 facility. Lacking firsthand knowledge of this building type, AIT set a 12-month timeline for constructing the facility—a timeline that proved impossible to meet.

“No time was allocated in the schedule for commissioning or accreditation of the facility,” says Sorensen. “Four to six months is required at the end of construction to complete the commissioning process, and additional time is needed for accreditation. They expected the lab to be operational 366 days after the groundbreaking ceremony, but the construction phase ended up taking 20 months. It’s very important to present a realistic schedule that includes all that extra time.”

Just as important, says Sorensen, is initiating the commissioning process early. Commissioning can occur concurrently with construction and certification. It is also a good time to begin working on the procedure manuals for the facility. These documents are essential to the operations of the facility and an important part of the certification process.

“It’s never too early to start commissioning,” he says. “Commissioning of our facility began in the fourth month of construction, with verification of all components paralleling their installation. This was crucial, since there were thousands of individual components with individual component verification sheets. It was particularly important to verify the control components as they were installed, since these controls are vital to the functioning of the facility.”

Because CL3 facilities have such unique requirements, prequalification of contractors can make all the difference, says Sorensen.

“Very few contractors have actually worked on high-containment facilities, so you may not be able to find someone with experience,” he says, “but if you can, their participation is golden to you.”

Because the general contractor of the Alberta facility had no high-containment experience, extra vigilance was required from the architects and AFLB to ensure that the facility was built to meet the stringent CL3 specifications. Even so, crucial interrelationships among components were missed, causing delays and requiring compromise.

“In the standard Government of Alberta specification format, the details about the concrete are in the structural section, while the epoxy coating details are in the finishings section,” says Sorensen. “However, the concrete has to cure for six months before epoxy can be applied, and this wasn’t accounted for in the original schedule, which meant that the second-floor slab pour didn’t happen in time to achieve the 12-month timeline.”

A compromise was made in an attempt to meet the 12-month schedule: Drywall was applied over the concrete and the epoxy coating was applied to the drywall ceiling.

Vigilance should also extend to the work of subcontractors, Sorensen says. Errors can result when discrepancies exist between specifications and blueprints, or when details in the specifications or on the blueprints are not reflected in the subcontractor’s contracts. These errors can be extremely difficult and costly to correct in a CL3 facility.

“Pay attention to the details,” he advises, “because they’re very hard to correct later. In addition, expect to miss something important. Set aside a portion of the budget to make the necessary changes or additions after the construction period.”

Finally, for such a complex building type, Sorensen advises keeping the design as simple as possible.

“Containment facilities tend to be hard, noisy, and bland,” he says. “Color can be used to brighten things up, but function has to trump form.

“In our facility, colored inserts were cut into the resilient flooring,” he says. “This dramatically increased the length of seams in the floor, all of which had to be inspected, and many have had to be redone more than once.

“Similarly, we had to cut a hole in a wall to install some vaporized hydrogen peroxide ports, but the wall was painted a special color that isn’t available in less than 100-gallon quantities,” Sorensen adds. “The quote for patching these holes in white is $1,300, but for a matching color it’s on the order of $30,000.”

Moving In

Despite encountering pitfalls, Sorensen is sanguine about the finished product.

“We were able to design a world-class facility very quickly, and I think we got it right,” he says. “In any project there are a number of things that, in 20/20 hindsight, should have been done differently, but this is not to say that the facility that we have is not state-of-the-art.”

Part of the facility is currently occupied and operating at a CL2+ level, and AFLB recently received certification to begin CL3 operations.

“Everyone is eager to get in and use the rest of the facility,” Sorensen says. “It’s new, well-equipped, and spacious.”

By Deborah Kreuze

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