Roughing It: Kiewit Construction Takes on the Tough Jobs.

• Author: Campbell, Melissa

THINK YOU'VE GOT A TOUGH JOB?

Try spending two years working in a tunnel out in the middle of nowhere, packing up all your equipment and hitailing it out every time a train was due.

Or pouring huge slabs of concrete in downtown Anchorage, with little space and lots of traffic.

Or feeling as if you have to dodge airplanes just driving to the job site.

Sound like it's time to ask the boss for hazardous pay? That's what the folks at Kiewit Construction Co. call a normal day.

"We don't build too many square office buildings," said Mike Barta, Kiewit. Construction Co.'s Alaska area manager. "We're a company comprised of engineers who tend to go with more difficult and tougher engineering challenges. It's what we do best; that's where we are able to utilize our engineering expertise."

Difficult may be an understatement. Kiewit managers tend to seek out the jobs that would have many throwing up their hands in fervent frustration. Whether it's battling the traffic pouring the state's longest concrete slab at Anchorage's downtown Marriott Hotel or ducking the jet streams of dozens of planes every day at the Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport, Kiewit has taken on the challenge. And, managers say, they often do the job on schedule and on budget.

CHALLENGES HAVE THEIR REWARDS

During the recent hotel construction boom in Anchorage, Kiewit managers had their hands in one of the more difficult projects: the Downtown Anchorage Marriott Hotel. Located in the heart of the city--amid narrow streets and sidewalks--the construction company poured the concrete for the hotel's foundation.

It wasn't your everyday pour. This project included 4,400 cubic yards of concrete, 500 tons of rebar and took 14 hours to complete--the largest continuous concrete pour in the history of Alaska construction.

"That's probably what piqued our interest in the project," Barta said.

Kiewit engineers were awarded the contract to design, build, operate and maintain the 2.6-mile, $80 million Whittier access tunnel project which allows the addition of vehicular passage from Portage to Whittier. The tunnel for decades was merely a passageway for trains to carry cargo and tourists to the deep-water port in Prince William Sound.

Work was completed without disrupting train schedules. When a train was due, crews spent up to two hours breaking down equipment, getting it all outside and waiting for the train to pass before heading back into the mountain, said the project's manager...