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Smith-Midland Wins Award
Smith-Midland Wins AwardOfficials at Smith-Midland Corp. recently won a Creative Use of Precast (CUP) Award for a building project in Virginia Beach.
This is the fifth consecutive year that Smith-Midland has received a CUP award.
Officials at Fort Story wanted to construct a replica of an Iraqi village in order to provide a realistic training environment for logistics troops.
Fort Story is a sub-installation of Fort Eustis, home of the U.S. Army's Transportation Corps. Together, Fort Story and Fort Eustis provide training specializing in land and sea transportation. Fort Story is located within the city of Virginia Beach.
Smith-Midland produced a total of 35 buildings of various sizes, all customized and configured to realistically depict what troops would find in Iraq, from smaller enclosures to larger structures.
The buildings were customized with a Broom Finish and a Canyon-Tone Stain so they would appear as similar as possible to the architecture found in Iraq. The ability to customize the finish in a cost-effective manner was a major benefit to the government customer.
Various characteristics of the Easi-Set and Easi-Span buildings used at Fort Story made them a perfect fit for the project. Easi-Set buildings cost substantially less than equivalent in-place construction. Because of the precast “floating slab” foundation floor slab, no foundations or footings were required beyond level compacted sand or gravel.
Because of this, Fort Story personnel did not have to carry out intensive site preparation before the buildings arrived.
Additionally, there is a substantial time savings because buildings can be installed the same day they are delivered.
The buildings meet the bullet-resistance standard and are rated for wind loads of 130 mph, both of which are important considerations for live-fire training in a hurricane-prone area.
Ultimately, the ability to make the environment as realistic as possible helps troops to train the way they will fight; such training saves lives, because it draws on lessons learned in combat.
The entire project was completed in the summer of 2008 at a grand total of about $500,000.
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