West Central Cooperative Flat Grain Storage Building

Adair, Iowa

Project Manager: Sam Harding  

Superintendent: John Zepp

Architectural Work: Design-Build by Shriver Construction Company

Contract Amount: $919,700.00

Completion Date: October 1997

Project Description:

West Central Cooperative needed to increase its grain storage capacity at its facility in Adair.  Due to the nature of the site, construction space was very limited.  New vertical storage units were possible, but nearly cost prohibitive based on the poor soil conditions that required extremely large, deep footings.  The cooperative had acquired a large metal building across the creek from its facility and was using it to store grain by trucking the grain to it and using a very labor intensive operation to unload and pile it in the building.

By examining the existing facility, Shriver Construction Company was able to determine that the present building could be disassembled and a new building installed using the same foundation and floor.  The new building was designed with taller sidewalls and a higher pitch allowing a grain conveyor to be hung down the center of the building.  West Central then hired a millwright firm to construct a new conveyor structure across the creek, connecting it to the building conveyor.  The result was a much more useful facility that allowed the cooperative to load the building with grain using automatic conveying systems rather than the previous labor intensive methods.  The new facility also holds more than twice as much grain through the more efficient loading method and increased height of the building.

All in all, the new facility now holds 3.5 million bushels of corn making it the largest flat storage building in the entire State of Iowa.  The building is covered with a Standing Seam Roof to provide premium roof performance with ridge ventilators to evacuate the grain dust and provide proper ventilation for the stored grain.  The walls are Panel Rib with fiberglass wall lites to provide some natural light to aid in the inspection of the grain.

Unusual or Unique Features:

The use of a new pre-engineered building structure on the foundation system for a previous pre-engineered building required tremendous coordination between Shriver Construction Company and VP Buildings to ensure that the new building would both fit the foundation and not overload the foundation at the same time. Through careful measurement and verification, the new building fit extremely well and was able to fall within the tolerances of loads that the foundation was capable of supporting.

A great deal of coordination was also required to assure that the millwright firm hired by the owner was able to have adequate clearances for its conveying equipment to operate.  This combined with working with them to coordinate the entry point for the conveyor system and the connections entailed by that also made excellent communication the key to the entire project.

All of this was further complicated by the need to coordinate with contractor hired by the owner to dismantle the existing building and remove it from the site.  Through careful coordination, the new building was able to begin being erected while the old building was still being removed, thus speeding up the entire construction cycle, a critical item to the owner as the building was needed for grain storage for the coming harvest.  The successful communication and coordination allowed the owner to use the facility on time and within budget.