Overhauling the Pentagon

loods. Fire. Vermin. Darkness. While that may sound like a good start on the Old Testament's 10 plagues, it's actually a list of some of the nuisances the Pentagon's 25,000 workers encounter daily. The Pentagon opened for business in 1943 and hasn't had a major upgrade since. What it has had is a patchwork of "improvements." Now it's undergoing a top-to-bottom, complete renovation. The project is enormous: It's slated to take more than 20 years and cost an estimated $3 billion.

Risky Business

Although a few aspects of the project are controversial, no one will argue that the effort is unnecessary. In addition to the plagues mentioned above, the Pentagon has about 30 localized electrical outages every day. In some places, the basement slab had settled as much as 12 inches. The building doesn't comply with health, fire or safety standards; it hasn't met electrical code, for example, since 1953.

Because it was built during World War II, when steel was hoarded for battleships, the Pentagon has no passenger elevators. People with mobility disabilities must ride in one of the building's 12 freight elevators, which have doors that close from floor and ceiling; more than 40 head injuries were reported in one three-year period. The Pentagon doesn't comply with the Americans With Disabilities Act: Among other problems, most rest rooms are not accessible.

Hazardous materials can be found throughout the building. Asbestos is in the ceilings, heating and ventilating ducts, pipes and floor coverings. There's also a wealth of lead and mercury.

"Major building engineering systems have deteriorated to such an extent that repairs are no longer effective and entire systems need replacement," says the Pentagon Renovation Program's March 2000 report to Congress. The building is "unable to meet the demands tenants place on it."

When the systems fail, the results are not pretty. In August 1990, during Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm, a fire broke out in the Joint Chiefs of Staff offices. The plumbing system couldn't take the pressure of the firefighting effort, and a 4-foot section of 10-inch pipe blew out. Seven million gallons of water flooded approximately 350,000 square feet of the Pentagon's basement, jeopardizing activities in the Army and Air Force operations centers.

The building's systems, said one consultant, are on the verge of "catastrophic failure."

Perhaps the biggest concern driving the project is security. Since the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, federal workers everywhere have felt more vulnerable, and nowhere more so than at the Pentagon. Currently, Metro subway escalators deposit riders right into the building. Buses run within 30 feet of the main entrance. Visitors can get into the Pentagon proper before being screened and passing through security. It is time for some changes.

Cracking the Codes

The renovation project (Motto: "On Cost, On Schedule, Built for the Next 50 Years") aims to improve the building operations and efficiency, better the quality of life for tenants and give taxpayers "significant value for the money spent."

Fulfilling these lofty ideals means:

• Removing all hazardous materials.
  
• Upgrading the electrical, plumbing, heating, sprinkler, ventilating and cooling systems.
  
• Installing state-of-the-art communications wiring, and running classified and unclassified lines to each desktop.
  
• Putting in new elevators and escalators.
  
• Improving traffic flow and pedestrian safety in the roads and lots surrounding the building.
  
• Providing employees with a modern, flexible workspace.
  

Making the building less vulnerable to attack means placing blast-resistant windows on the innermost and outermost of the Pentagon's five rings; relocating the bus hub and the subway escalators (see box, page 82); building a security screening facility for employees and visitors that is 50 feet away from the main building; installing crash gates and pop-up barriers; and erecting a 250,000-square-foot facility with 38 loading docks to receive and screen the thousands of deliveries to the Pentagon each day.

Once the renovation is done, the Defense Department should have a headquarters that meets fire, health and safety codes; is free of hazardous materials; has better office space; complies with the Americans With Disabilities Act; is much more secure; has state-of-the-art telecommunications and information technology systems; and has room for expansion.

But the Pentagon renovation team ("PenRen," they're called) must do all that while working under some strict constraints. First, they are required to preserve certain of the building's historic elements. Contractors even went back to the Indiana quarry where the building's original limestone came from to get more for the access ramps and pedestrian bridges on the River and South terraces. Second, they must comply with modern energy conservation and environmental rules. Third, they must not let construction interfere with the work of the building's tenants. Finally, they must do all this within a demolition and construction budget that's capped at $1.22 billion.

Can it be done? Check back in another 13 years or so.

Wedge by Wedge

"There's no down time at the Pentagon," says Pentagon renovation team spokesman Tom Fontana. And that is the biggest challenge for the 100 people in the renovation office and their contractors.

Unlike in many renovation projects, contractors can't just go in and rip out old wiring, communications lines and plumbing to replace them. Everyone but the workers in the space actually being worked on must stay connected. In addition, no record exists of the patchwork of additions and upgrades made to the Pentagon over the past 57 years. So construction crews must "painstakingly trace each and every one" of the 16,000 miles of antiquated copper phone lines, says Fontana, making sure not to interrupt service for the building's workers.

Of course, mistakes do happen, and when they do, affected workers can call a hot line to report outages. Calls come in spurts, usually when new construction starts, and only about a half-dozen at a time. There's another hot line for reporting noise, dust and other construction-related problems.

Glenn Flood, who works in the office of the assistant secretary of Defense for public affairs, says his office had problems with noise when construction first started. Staffers sometimes had to ask the construction office to lay off pile driving during an important meeting or a press briefing. But, like others interviewed, Flood says the construction office was responsive to the requests.

Most Pentagon workers take in stride the disruption and inconvenience that construction brings-they see it as inevitable. "They haven't yet invented a pile driver-or a drill or a hammer-that doesn't make a noise," says Fontana.

While workers around a construction area have hot lines to call, those in an area being renovated have to move out. The Pentagon-a five-sided, five-ringed structure-also is divided into five pie slices, or wedges. Wedge 1, now being worked on, was the first to be emptied of tenants.

Each 1 million-square-foot wedge houses about 5,000 workers, and most of those who used to work in Wedge 1 now call Rosslyn or Crystal City, both nearby in Northern Virginia, home. Far from being irritated at being displaced, most of them are thrilled.

Bob Fano, a lawyer with the Army judge advocate general's office, finds many benefits to being off-site. "The quality of the office is what you would expect in the private sector," says Fano. Back at the Pentagon, he says, "only the pachyderms-the big elephants-had windows." In the new space, "most of our folks have windows. And it's much quieter-it's very pleasant."

He also appreciates that the staff is in one location; it's easy to walk from office to office and see everyone who works in his division. "It helps to get to know the folks you work with. It adds to camaraderie, it's more fun." Back at the Pentagon, his division's staff was scattered all over the building.

Like Fano, John Hoffman, a public affairs officer with the National Guard Bureau, appreciates that his staff was consolidated in the move. He also likes the new surroundings, such as the "high-powered phones and ergonomic chairs," which are so complicated, says Hoffman, "we had to go to school to learn how to use them."

Being out of the Pentagon does have its disadvantages, the biggest being logistical. Most workers have to schlep to the main building at least once a week, and some have to do it every day. Shuttle buses can be terribly convenient or terribly inconvenient, depending on where your office is located.

And because they've left the major transportation hub that is the Pentagon, some employees have had problems with their new commutes. Fano lost his carpool and has to pay more for parking or ride another bus to his office from the Pentagon. A few employees even quit their jobs because the extra hour a day made the commute unworkable.

Attacking the Asbestos

A lot of work goes on behind the scenes to get ready for construction. The renovation office staff must locate and lease temporary office space within three miles of the Pentagon and have it finished to meet the needs of incoming workers. They have to get the relocating workers packed, moved and set up in the new space. They must erect walls to protect those working near the construction in the Pentagon from noise, dust and other hazards. And they have to set up temporary communication and utility "runarounds" so those still in the Pentagon will have services.

Once all that is in place, demolition begins. Not only do the wires and other systems have to be removed carefully, but also the hazardous materials must be handled with kid gloves. Workers extracted 4 million pounds of asbestos from Wedge 1 alone; they expect 25 million pounds to come out of the building before the project is done. More than 15 million pounds of debris of all types was removed from Wedge 1; 70 percent of it was recycled. Seven years after the first sledgehammer hit, and 10 years after the congressional go-ahead, Wedge 1 is almost ready for its new tenants.

Fontana expects Wedges 2 to 5, which are being treated as one project for contracting purposes, to go much more quickly-Wedge 1 was a test case.

Time vs. Money

Though the project's timetable has slipped, the budget has not. That's because it's capped at $1.22 billion for demolition and construction and $3 billion total. The $3 billion has to cover everything-including things like leasing off-site space and moving tenants; the new heating, ventilating and air-conditioning system; the new waste incinerator; and the new remote delivery facility-with no escalation clause.

The PenRen folks have taken some newfangled approaches to getting the project done with limited dollars. They're negotiating fixed-price contracts and giving vendors incentives to get projects done on time and at-or under-budget. They involve all disciplines affected (including maintenance, security, tenants and historical boards) in planning teams, which results in fewer changes later. They've moved away from low-bid contracts and gone to best-value contracts with performance incentives.

The new approach is working. The remote delivery facility, for example, is almost finished, and it's under budget and right on schedule.

So when costs climbed and budgets threatened to bust, the project office scaled back. The team decided to renovate only part of the basement, for example, and will drop the automated energy management and controls it once planned. The team even shrank itself two-thirds: from 300 to 100.

Fontana views the expansion of the time line as a learning experience. Originally scheduled to take 16 years, the project is now estimated at 23. The original planners, says Fontana, "didn't envision the time and difficulty of moving people." They also couldn't have known that the building was riddled with mercury, lead and asbestos, or have foreseen the difficulties of removing them. And they estimated that each wedge would take two years to complete; Wedge 1 work is revealing that three years is more realistic.

Most of all, says Fontana, project planners "didn't recognize the challenges of working around people" in the building. That requires more time and more care.

The most important lesson learned, Fontana says, is to keep tenants informed. If people understand when and why something is happening, they'll be more flexible about it. That's something the PenRen office tries to keep in mind. Pentagon workers "all have critical missions," says Fontana. No matter what we're doing, there's "always a person at the end of it-our customer. Early on [in the project], that sensitivity wasn't there."

With such a long-term undertaking, another enemy of progress is progress itself. The Pentagon can't afford to constantly revise its plans to incorporate the latest telecommunications technology. So the team has taken a longer-term view, focusing on the fact that whatever they install will be several decades more up to date than what was there. "Better is often the enemy of good enough," says Col. Robert Kirsch, program manager for information management and telecommunications.

Rising From the Dungeon

The reviews of completed renovated space in the basement and mezzanine give a taste of things to come. A number of the 1,300 workers who have moved in say it's good-even great.

Sgt. Howard Jackson, who works in the Air Force aerial events division, remembers his first days in the Pentagon's unrenovated basement. "It was dark. I couldn't tell the color of the carpet because of all the stains, and it had a smell to it. We had furry little creatures visiting."

When he moved to the renovated mezzanine, he says, "It was like going from a dungeon up to the throne of a castle."

Caroline Polk is a Washington-based freelance writer.