MAINE MEDICAL CENTER

-
PROJECT
Maine Medical Center
-
MARKETS
Demolition, Remediation, & Abatement
-
CONTRACT TYPE
Specialty Contractor
-
PROJECT OWNER
MaineHealth
-
LOCATION
Portland, ME
-
Almost 50 years after Manafort Brothers, Inc. constructed the original Maine Medical Center parking garage, Manafort was selected to demolish the same parking garage as part of a Medical Center Complex expansion project. The project involved lead abatement and demolition of a 367,000 square-foot 10-story parking garage, 3 connector bridges, and a helicopter pad. This project was complex due to the garage’s proximity to an active hospital and existing visitor/employee parking garage. The existing South Wall acted as a fifty-foot-tall retaining wall supporting a service drive and an adjacent hospital building. To accommodate the service drive and the adjacent building, the South Wall required additional structural support using soil tie-back anchors, temporary shoring installation, and surgical separation to mitigate any impacts during the demolition operations.
In order to keep Maine Medical Center’s operations continuous, Manafort had to phase demolition to create a separation between the garage and the medical building’s shared wall. A complete analysis of the existing garage, including destructive investigations of the existing structural components of the garage aiding in the surgical separation of the garage from the South Wall. A saw-cutting operation was initiated to provide numerous openings throughout the garage in order to make way for additional structural support systems, such as tiebacks, to be installed to secure the service drive and adjacent building that were structurally supported by the South Wall of the garage. Lead-containing paint was removed from the parking garage utilizing a dry-ice blasting method. A protective assembly was engineered and constructed to cover and protect the live transformers that serviced the building.

Upon completion of all enabling activities, mechanical demolition commenced utilizing a high-reach excavator with 132 feet of vertical reach. Demolition commenced one bay at a time, starting from the top of the garage and progressing to the lower levels. All concrete was processed with a pulverizer attachment for offsite recycling.
Manafort’s extensive knowledge, planning, and creativity in both construction and demolition practices brought this project to completion while maintaining the Medical Center’s operations and delivering a safe, successful, on-time and on-budget result.