A major military construction project at Fort Riley, Kansas, is giving concrete masonry and stone veneer a prominent role in a high-security, mission-driven facility.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, through its Kansas City District, is building a 119,000-square-foot Attack Aviation Battalion Complex at Marshall Army Airfield. The project is estimated at $83 million and is designed to expand maintenance and storage space for the base’s Apache helicopter squadron, which currently operates from a nearby hangar built more than a decade ago. According to the Corps, the new complex is set up to store six additional aircraft under normal conditions, and it can be reconfigured to house more during severe weather.
The building program goes well beyond hangar space. Plans include a two-story administrative area connected to the maintenance hangar bay, along with parking, armament and ammunition storage vaults for aircraft and security forces, support infrastructure, and specialized fire suppression systems.
Walsh Group is serving as prime contractor and is coordinating multiple trades, including concrete work and masonry. Project officials said the vaults are built with concrete walls that range from 2 to 3 feet thick and include double vault doors. On the exterior, the design calls for split-face stone installed over concrete masonry units, with metal panel reinforcement in some areas.
Construction is in the structural phase, with officials reporting that 60 to 70 percent of the main building’s structural work is complete. That progress includes the exterior CMU walls, foundation slabs, and portions of the hangar’s steel frame.
For mason contractors watching jobs like this, the story is a reminder that QA drives production on complex work. The Corps’ teams are performing concrete temperature and air pressure testing, plus moisture and density testing on backfilled soil. They also inspected a slab-on-grade metal deck for a second-floor concrete placement and ran density testing around an underground 30,000-gallon water storage tank used for firefighting. On federal projects, staying inside specified tolerances and having a clear correction plan when work falls out of tolerance is part of the job.
The complex is scheduled for completion in August 2027, with the Corps noting that contract modifications can affect the timeline.
Read the full, original article from The Defence Blog here.