Army Reserve Engineers help convert base

Army Reserve Magazine, Spring, 2002 by David C. Cooper

"The 416th Engineer folks were a real force multiplier".

Across the United States, closing military bases stand as decaying monuments to the greatest battle of the second half of the Twentieth Century -- the Cold War. Like ghost towns of the Old West, countless barracks, piers and runways now sit idle.

At the Mare Island Naval Shipyard in California, Army Reserve Engineers are returning some of these assets to productivity.

For the past four years, members of the U.S. Army Facility Engineer Group have helped convert part of Mare Island Naval Shipyard to a Maritime Center of Excellence through a steady stream of customized consulting engineering services, including design, project and construction management, inspections, surveys, independent government estimates and scopes of work.

These Reservists provide this service at a fraction of the cost of civilian contractors. Team members estimate that the cost savings for the work of the Army Reserve engineers on over $13 million of completed or proposed construction projects exceeds $120,000.

The U.S. Navy established Mare Island Naval Shipyard, or MINSY, in 1854, for building and outfitting war fighting sea craft. Under continuous construction and adaptation, MINSY became an intricate maze of facilities, piers, dry docks and berths producing 512 ships between 1854 and 1970.

When MINSY closed in 1994 under the Base Realignment and Closure Program, the Army Reserve's 63rd Regional Support Command acquired a 25-acre, waterfront site, with two 700-foot finger piers, two 55,000 square-foot barracks buildings, one 22,000 square-foot wooden office building, a bunker, a former McDonalds restaurant, two maintenance buildings and a fire station.

Mare Island's infrastructure, with its piers, offices, maintenance facilities and access to the San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean seemed a choice location for the 63rd's Maritime Center of Excellence. The plan was to collocate Engineer, Heavy Boat and Port Construction units, and create a realistic water-training site for water borne units.

The Reserve Engineer team, which included Registered Professional Engineers with decades of construction expertise, provided detailed analyses on how this could best be accomplished. They provided the contracting agency with a bid-ready document that could immediately be given to contractors, which expedited construction.

Over the course of the project, the team submitted work on remodeling barracks buildings into offices, relocating a Marine Army Maintenance Support Activity (AMSA), converting a bunker into a brigade-sized arms room, options for dining facilities and adapting an asphalt lot to a Military Equipment Storage area, including a hazardous waste storage site.

The pivotal selection factor for locating the Maritime Center of Excellence at MINSY was the two 700-foot finger piers. Potentially capable of supporting ten US Army Port construction Landing Craft, Unit (LCU), the piers required repair, and the utilities on the piers required upgrade. The Reserve Engineers investigated the condition of the utilities and provided recommendations to independently meter and upgrade sewer, water and electrical.

Since the finger piers were not configured for US Army watercraft, the points of connections for the services had to be dismantled from the unit's former location, brought to MINSY and installed on the piers.

The team conducted coordination with the local utility providers for current metering strategy and developed Scopes of Work for repair and upgrade. At final count, eight U.S. Army LCUs are anchored on the two 700-foot piers, each with its own dedicated services.

An essential part of the operations of the boats were the associated maintenance facilities. The Reserve Engineers developed a flexible plan combining a temporary Marine AMSA solution with a permanent Marine / Ground AMSA. In early 2000, relocation of a Butler building and conversion into a structurally sound Marine AMSA with dedicated utilities, cranes, generators and maintenance tools was completed at a cost of less than $260,000.

Other projects included the $1M renovation of a 55,000 square-foot, three-story brick building, including the last-minute addition of a Total Army Distance Learning Center; a 750 drilling Reservists dining facility proposal for an abandoned McDonalds restaurant; and perimeter and grounds construction projects totaling over $250,000.

Maj. Gen John Scott, Commanding General of 63rd RSC, expressed his appreciation, by saying, "The 416th Engineer folks were a real force multiplier. Under general direction from my Engineer, they took the point and provided the initial site surveys and engineering analyses that enabled the Mare Island acquisition to proceed."

Army Reserve Engineers from the U.S. Army Facility Engineer Group showed their effectiveness with this mission and provided not only fiscal value and improved quality of life, but proved that innovative thinking within the military engineer community can produce high quality construction results, on time and within budget.