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V O L . X X V I N O. X V I I J U LY 2 7 , 2 0 2 0 28 R E A L E S T A T E / C O N S T R U C T I O N / E N G I N E E R I N G F O C U S 'Any answer is better than no answer' Decisions were made on the fly in ways neither Piper nor French had ever seen before. Piper says holding back rather than giving a wrong answer went out the window. "Here, any answer was better than no answer," he says. People from Abbott were also on site, so decisions could be made quickly. "We'd huddle and make decisions on the fly," says French. Decisions that usually took weeks, or even months, were done in an hour, or a day. "We had to stay on schedule," he says. "A miss would be big. ere was no wiggle room." Piper says preparing a massive empty space for an intricate produc- tion process is complicated, with a lot of moving pieces. Normally, they'd put together three, four, five designs for something. "Here we had one and had to go with it," he says. "Early decisions had to stick." at could be unnerving. "I never had so many wake-up-in-the-middle- of-the-night moments as I did with this, wondering if I'd made the right deci- sions," Piper says. Outside the box When Landry/French first came onsite, five or six workers were methodically dismantling the conveyor belts, a process that can take weeks. French's team took over and deployed 52 welders, cutters, people to unbolt things and do other jobs, and 10 pieces of heavy machinery. e belts were down in five days. at set the tone. ere's usually one supervisor over- seeing a job site, but Landry/French used five, one for each trade. When it was discovered the floor was an inch and a half out of level, Piper's design team scrambled to make new designs, a process that normally would have taken months. "It was remarkable," says French. "I've never seen anything like that." 20251422 Perkins Thompson_3/8.ad3.indd 1 3/8/19 1:58 PM Contact Nick Sabatine at the idea-stage: nsabatine@ransomenv.com 207-772-2891 D E V E L O P M E N T \ \ D U E D I L I G E N C E \ \ E N V I R O N M E N TA L H E A LT H & S A F E T Y \ \ M U N I C I PA L \ \ U T I L I T Y, E N E R G Y & M A N U FA C T U R I N G Site Planning Wastewater Engineering Storm Water Engineering Permitting Water Supply Engineering GIS Applications Turnkey Brownfield Services Remediation Funding Assistance Consulting Engineers and Scientists www.RansomEnv.com 58 BOYD STREET APARTMENTS, PORTLAND Assisting Development Across Maine » C O N T I N U E D F RO M P R E V I O U S PA G E I never had so many wake-up-in-the-middle- of-the-night moments as I did with this, wondering if I'd made the right decisions. — Craig Piper SMRT Architects and Engineering

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