Design work, for the new Utah State Prison currently under construction located west of the Salt Lake City airport, began back in 2016. The first of the housing units on the project is scheduled for completion mid-year 2021, with the remaining buildings to be completed sometime in the latter part of 2021 and the first half of 2022. The typical building on site is a one or two-story concrete tilt-up insulated sandwich panel building.
Design and construction challenges included dealing with soft soils, a corrosive environment, and coordinating with multiple design and construction teams to ensure a consistent outcome. This presentation provides a look at how these design challenges were approached along with some construction challenges that have been encountered along the way. Several buildings on site were structurally complete while several others were under construction when the Magna earthquake of March 2020 occurred. Some anecdotal data suggests that these buildings may have experienced accelerations that were near the accelerations used for design. We will briefly discuss our observations pertaining to the seismic structural performance of buildings in both stages of construction.
Learning Objectives:
- Be able to identify design requirements that are unique to the design of correctional facilities
- Be able to identify challenges and recommendations in working on a large-scale multi-team project
- Be able to describe strategies for designing concrete tilt-structures for corrosive environments
- Be able to describe the observed seismic performance of a concrete tilt-up building subjected to the 2020 Magna earthquake
