Pass the Bottle

Massive Bottling Plant on Tap for Phoenix

Phoenix would seem an unlikely place for a water bottling facility, but its Southwest location attracted the attention of a major water producer from Pennsylvania.

 

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About 30 million cases of premium drinking water will be produced each year at the firm's new, state-of-the-art facility near 51st Street and the Red Mountain Freeway.

The combination 600,000-sq.-ft. manufacturing building and warehouse employs a 12-in. city water line, reverse osmosis and proprietary formulas to turn 1,150 gpm of city tap water into premium bottled water every day. To do that, the warehouse needs a lot of electricity.

The project features its own 28 mW electrical substation, providing enough power for nearly 20,000 homes. Electrical designers had to estimate the needs of the German-made filtering and bottling equipment, which was being designed and constructed on a parallel track with the design and construction of the new facility.

"Projects like these don't come around very often," said Doug Payne, an electrical engineer with the Phoenix office of OMB Electrical Engineers Inc. "You normally don't see a 16-unit substation in a building with the voltage they have. When you have a utility company put their switchyard on a project, it's very unique."

Construction on the $54 million project started in October 2004 and water manufacturing began at the plant this summer.

The project isn't a typical tilt-up boxy warehouse. The designers and owners created an attractive building with architectural features such as glass ellipses on each corner and a grand entry at the front of the building.

"The ellipses have been a challenge, but our client wanted something no one else had and he got it," said architect J.R. Medina of Irvine, Calif.-based Ware Malcomb Architects. "This is the largest bottling plant of its kind in North America, which in itself is a tough job, but with the team we had it came together pretty well."

The structure is essentially a building within a building. Concrete tilt panels on the exterior form an outer wall, while more concrete tilt panels in the interior create a clean-room-style manufacturing floor for the high-tech bottling equipment.

Still, designers kept the building flexible.

"This building is well-made in the event something changed for the client," said Steve Bosclear, project manager for general contractor Howard S. Wright of Phoenix. "All the interior walls can be removed if needed and become available for conventional warehouse space."

Phoenix-based Schuff Steel Management erected more than 1,600 tons of structural steel and 700 tons of roof- joist steel, with Suntec Concrete of Phoenix performing the slab and tilt- wall construction.

"It took a lot of coordination to make everything fit," said Schuff Steel project manager Brian Eskelson. "A lot of the stuff was detailed in 3-D models, which had to overlay with someone else's 3-D model, so it was a complicated process."

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