San Diego Market Report

Contractors scramble to clean up after October wildfires that destroyed 1,700 homes in San Diego County

By Joe Florkowski

Rebuilding after the San Diego County fires requires that contractors be as careful with people’s feelings as they are with building materials.

The October wildfires destroyed nearly 1,700 homes throughout the county and the contractors working to clean up the former home sites say it is a delicate process.

“It’s not a typical construction job,” says Tom Meichtry, director of the Inland Empire for Nolte Engineering, one of the subcontractors working on the fire cleanup job. It’s filled with a lot of emotions and requires staff to be sensitive, he adds.

A majority of the destroyed homes – 1,018 – were in unincorporated San Diego County, which meant that county officials had to oversee the necessary planning, cleanup and rebuilding once the fires died down.
So far, county officials report encouraging progress – progress that has been made possible because much was learned from the wildfires that occurred in 2003. That year, the Cedar fire destroyed about 2,100 homes, and it provided county officials and homeowners with ideas and ways to prepare for future wildfires.

Fire protection and breaks built into homes and developments after the Cedar fire helped save homes in 2007, says Clay Westling, senior structural engineer for the building division of San Diego County.

While not as many homes were destroyed as in 2003, this year’s wildfires were still costly.

County officials estimated the damage from the 2007 fires at $670 million. State and federal funds are being used to contribute to the cleanup.

Once the 2007 fires were contained and extinguished, county officials put into place a series of plans to clean up the sites, prevent further damage from winter rains and help residents rebuild quickly. On the planning and permitting side, the county has waived permit fees for rebuilding and expedited the plan processing for fire victims, according to Westling.

Immediately after the fires, one of the county’s first necessary steps was to clean up the properties – both for environmental reasons and to allow home builders the ability to rebuild.

The ash from destroyed homes likely contained heavy metal contaminants, and the county needed to ensure those contaminants did not wash into any large water bodies. It hired two local contractors, PRI and RORE, to manage the abatement of the properties. PRI and RORE then subcontracted with a number of other companies, including Nolte, to help manage the process.

The county and its contractors began working to clear the properties in November and expect clearing some properties will continue into 2008. They worked six days a week, clearing 10 to 20 properties each day.

The contractors have a basic three-step process to clean up the sites – they safely handle the material, remove it promptly and dispose of it properly, says Donna Turbyfill, deputy director of the management services division with the county’s department of public works.

County officials also had to get right-of-entry forms from the property owners in order to clear the properties, adds Turbyfill.

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So far, more than 500 property owners have returned the forms, she says.

“Most people have been extremely grateful,” Turbyfill says.

Many of the homes that burned were located in rural, isolated areas that require moving heavy construction equipment to the jobsites, Turbyfill says.

At the same time, some properties are hard to find. Street signs were destroyed and properties are rubble, says Nolte Engineering’s Meichtry.

If a team can’t find a location, it will do further research until it knows exactly where it is going, Meichtry says.

A team of two people from Nolte will visit each site and spend about two hours, Meichtry adds. Teams sketch the foundation and debris location on properties and also list potential hazards. They measure the remaining slab foundation and take many photos, often to get an idea of the “debris halo,” which marks how the house fell apart during the fire.

After debris is removed from the site, the project teams will winterize the area with sandbags or fiber-waddle rolls to prevent soil erosion. Seed mixture is also spread on the sites to establish a root system to prevent erosion.

Bumpy Road to Completion

Scripps Clinic Rancho Bernardo project overcomes multiple obstacles

By David Silva

For Kevin Horst, project manager for San Diego-based Reno Contracting Inc., building the $53 million Scripps Clinic in Ranch Bernardo brought some familiar obstacles: a tight construction schedule, a structure three times as big as the parcel it sat on allowed and an interior that had to be built before the exterior was finished.

But the one, much-less familiar obstacle was a scarcity in materials.

“We faced the typical lead times on the less ‘vanilla’ materials -- the stone, veneer and curtain wall and stuff,” he says. “When you’re getting stone from different countries -- ours came from India – that’s always something we track and try to plan for. We’re able to account for the longer lead times.

“But the more common stuff -- copper, steel, and aluminum -- are the newer challenges.”

Reno and project architect Pacific Cornerstone Architects of San Diego overcame the problems, which were caused by booming construction overseas and the rising costs in materials and fuel, but the experienced highlighted the increased complexity in building in today’s market.
 
“The real key to this project was getting the steel ordered,” says Tim Schulze, a partner and principal at Pacific Cornerstone. “We had to fast-track the structural-steel design for the building. And then we hoped the price of steel didn’t go up.”

The new 156,000-sq-ft building will replace the current Scripps Clinic Rancho Bernardo, located across the street on Innovation Drive. Construction began in September 2006 and the facility is slated to open in October.

Pacific Cornerstone’s design for the six-story medical office facility includes a new ambulatory surgery center, professional offices, fully digital radiology department, urgent care and a women’s imaging center. An adjacent six-level parking structure is being built concurrently.

“For the most part, the shell and core systems for the project are fairly straightforward,” Horst says. “We were the general contractor for the shell and ended up with the tenant improvements as well. This was fortunate, but the schedule we got from Scripps forced us to get going on the tenant-improvement works before the shell was actually ready.”

Schulze says his firm used a color palette of “laminated glazing, natural tones and warm colors.”

“We used lots of natural stones, and the parking structure is set up with green screens in front,” he adds. “It’s a short distance between the parking structure and the building, so we used the natural materials to distinguish the two.”

Schultz says that during the design process, Scripps changed the floor-plate size “three or four times,” gradually increasing it from 95,000 sq ft to 150,000. The final floor plate gave Pacific Cornerstone more room to play with, but presented a sticky problem.

“The land parcel only allowed for a 52,000-sq-ft building,” he says. “The (final plan) called for a 156,000-sq-ft building, 80 ft tall. To get the building to be built that high, we had to re-entitle the land. We took a look at basically an 80-acre area, determined what the impact to the local streets would be and negotiated with the city to get the project built. We had the building totally designed without a building permit.”

The Project Team

Owner/developer: Kilroy Realty Corp., Los Angeles
General Contractor: Reno Contracting Inc., San Diego
Project Architect: Pacific Cornerstone Architects, San Diego
Key Subcontractors: Hope Engineering, San Diego (structural); Michael Wall Engineering Inc., San Diego (electrical); Architectural Landscapes, San Diego (landscape); Walsh Engineers, San Diego (mechanical and plumbing)

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