A 75,000-square-foot expansion got fully underway over the weekend with a 10-hour continuous pour of concrete at Norfolk Iron & Metal, 1701 East South Ave.
The expansion initially will create several jobs at the plant and increase the size of the company’s truck fleet. The long-term effect will be more substantial.
“It’s more like 30 jobs over a time period,” said Kent Heermann, executive director of the Regional Development Association, who worked with Norfolk to secure the expansion for the Emporia plant. “My guess is that they’ll probably exceed that 30 number.”
Heermann based the guess on Norfolk’s history in Emporia. The company’s earlier incentive package had estimated it would employ about 75 people.
“It currently employs 149,” Heermann said. “… So, they exceeded the amount they were originally going to create in the first place.”
The company had several options when it decided to expand, and Heermann worked with Norfolk to ensure that it chose Emporia.
“They make choices of where they can expand, and they chose … their Norfolk site and here,” Heermann said. “We just worked with them on our performance-based initiatives to convince them to build here.”
Norfolk incentives total $3.7 million for the addition, which includes construction and equipment costs that will provide for additional rail spur access, cranes and for trucks, he said. The equipment portion of that total is $1.65 million.
Heermann said the performance-based incentives include a cash grant of $360,000 over three years, predicated on completing the construction project and meeting employment commitments. A 10-year tax abatement on the real property also was part of the total.
The company was given 12 acres on the south side of the site, which brought Norfolk’s total acreage to almost 40 acres.
“They have room to grow,” Heermann said. “Lots of room to grow.”
Last weekend, the signs of growth became obvious. Barney Smiley, superintendent for general contractor Hastco, talked Friday afternoon about the weekend concrete pour that would strain the capacity of the concrete contractor and the workers.
“It’s going to look like a football field out there,” Smiley said of the pour scheduled to begin at 2 a.m. Saturday morning.
And, in the dark of night, lit by three light towers with four lights each, it did.
“It went very well; they actually finished ahead,” Smiley said of the pour, which was completed by noon on Saturday. The goal had been to finish before dark.
The pour required coordination of trucks and manpower from Hastco, which had two people at the site, the 22 concrete workers from a Kansas City company, and 34 workers from Penny’s Ready Mix.
The project used 15 trucks from Penny’s in Emporia and, when the local plant ran out of concrete as planned for in advance, another 15 trucks from the company’s Ottawa location took over the shuttling back and forth between Emporia and Ottawa.
The chilly weather overnight Friday created a need to use Duraset to slow the curing process, and also created a significant but manageable drop in the temperature of the concrete itself.
“They had hot water in the concrete along with the Duraset,” Smiley said. “It was close to 160 degrees when it came from the plant (in Ottawa). Travel knocked it down to about 60 degrees” by the time it arrived in Emporia.
When the effort ended, 1,264 cubic yards of concrete had been poured and leveled on an area 550 feet by 100 feet. Another area, 250 by 100 feet, that will be part of the addition had been poured earlier.
Crews worked into the night on Sunday, scoring the concrete, which will take about seven days to cure. A sealing compound is being installed to help make the plant easy to clean and to protect the concrete. Then the building will begin to take shape.
“What’ll be the most impressive about this job is when we start erecting steel,” Smiley said.
Workers will assemble frames for bays 25 feet wide by 100 feet long. Then, a large crane will lift the 50,000-pound modules into place.
The modules will be staggered, every other bay, and other workers will build bays in between the pre-assembled frames and join them together in the finished product.
“You see results so quickly, and that’s what I’ve always liked about it,” Smiley said.
With a little cooperation from the weather, the building could be finished in three to four months.