3A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 15, 2018
Collapse at Oregon State project trouble for CLT industry
ment is delivering on its early
promise. “The wood prod-
ucts industry hasn’t had a lot
to get excited about over the
last two decades,” he said.
“We’ve been down for quite
a few years. Now, this thing
is like a freight train coming
through. We’re seeing build-
ings designed and built with
these new panels that are
beyond beautiful.”
The risk of new
technology
By JEFF MANNING
The Oregonian
CORVALLIS — When
Oregon State University lead-
ers decided in 2014 it was time
to replace the aging home of its
forestry school, they wanted
more than a new building.
They wanted a statement.
The new Peavy Hall would
symbolize the rebirth of the
state’s timber industry by
showcasing its signature inno-
vation: cross-laminated timber.
With its ambitious use of wood
that’s been fortified to rival
steel, Peavy Hall would under-
score Oregon’s place at the
forefront of a revitalized forest
products market.
But the general contractor
saw significant risks in using
an untested CLT manufac-
turer, like the one hired to sup-
ply the Corvallis project, and
wanted financial cover, docu-
ments obtained by The Orego-
nian. School officials, instead,
moved forward with a new
builder in December 2016.
In March, a 1,000-pound
section of the third floor buck-
led and crashed onto the floor
below. Engineers traced the
panel’s failure to the glue and
determined at least five other
panels showed signs of delami-
nation. The closer they looked,
the more bad CLT panels they
found; by August, at least 85
were marked for replacement.
Peavy Hall made a state-
ment all right: about the risks
of new technologies and get-
ting caught up in the enthusi-
asm of the next big thing. The
months of delays, the experts
and engineers, and the replace-
ment panels will add millions
to the cost of a project that
already has climbed nearly 32
percent, to $79 million, since
construction began.
The Peavy problem comes
after years of efforts by state
officials to promote a tech-
nology they view as an eco-
nomic engine for rural Oregon.
The state’s timber employment
has fallen 62 percent since
its 1980s heyday, from about
80,000 to 30,000. In 2015,
the state deemed the develop-
ment of cross-laminated tim-
ber buildings “essential” to the
state’s economic interests.
The panels were made
by DR Johnson, a venerable
Douglas County timber com-
pany and newly minted CLT
manufacturer, whose president,
Valerie Johnson, sits on the for-
estry school’s board of visitors.
Oregon State officials ini-
tially said they knew few
details of the DR Johnson con-
tract. It was actually a British
Columbia-based subcontractor,
StructureCraft, that signed that
contract, they noted.
But documents obtained
by The Oregonian show that
StructureCraft had no choice
but to hire DR Johnson. Bur-
ied deep in a 1,300-page “spec
book,” Oregon State included a
requirement that the CLT pan-
els used in Peavy Hall be man-
ufactured within 300 miles of
the job site. Only DR Johnson
met that requirement.
The laminated timber
movement sustained another
blow this summer when devel-
opers, citing construction costs,
pulled the plug on the Frame-
work building, a 12-story
building planned in Portland’s
Pearl District. It would have
been the tallest wooden tower
in the country.
Tom Williamson, a Van-
couver-based consultant and
expert on the wood technology,
said the setbacks, particularly
the problems at Peavy Hall,
won’t make it any easier for
No backup plan
AP Photos/Gillian Flaccus
TOP A machine applies glue to the next layer of a panel of
cross-laminated timber, or CLT, in the production facility
of DR Johnson Lumber Co., in Riddle, in 2016.
BOTTOM A forklift driver moves a newly assembled pan-
el of cross-laminated timber.
Oregon to become an import-
ant player in the market.
“You’ve got a new prod-
uct coming on line and the last
thing you need is a failure,” he
said. “The concrete industry
is all over this. You just can’t
afford any black eyes early in
the development.”
Bandwagon
On Aug. 1, the Oregon
Building Codes Structures
Board adopted groundbreak-
ing language allowing wood-
framed buildings as high as 18
stories, three times the effec-
tive current limit.
It is the latest move in the
state’s long and sustained effort
to make Oregon the epicenter
of CLT and other mass timber
components.
Gov. Kate Brown, her
Republican
gubernatorial
opponent Rep. Knute Buehler,
and her predecessor, Gov. John
Kitzhaber, have hopped aboard
the CLT bandwagon. State and
local officials have spent mil-
lions hosting symposiums,
funding design competitions
and mass timber think tanks.
Cross-laminated timber has
been in use in Europe for more
than two decades. It established
a North American beachhead
in Canada and is just now find-
ing its way into U.S. construc-
tion. Studies predict it could
grow into a $4 billion market
in this country alone.
The fabricated wood offered
politicians of all stripes the rare
public policy two-fer: the pos-
sibility of reversing the long
painful decline of timber-based
employment in Oregon with
an industry that boasts posi-
tive climate change attributes.
Boosters claim CLT buildings
store carbon while such com-
peting materials as steel and
concrete actually emit green-
house gases.
“It’s hard to overstate how
important we considered rural
economic development, it was
like the holy grail,” said Scott
Nelson, Kitzhaber’s adviser
on business and economic
matters.
CLT won’t replace the tens
of thousands of logging and
mill jobs that have disappeared
in the last five decades. But the
increasingly popular material
could create many as 17,000
jobs, according to a 2017 study
conducted by VertueLabs, a
nonprofit.
Not everyone buys the
buildup.
Environmentalists
are dubious about the indus-
try’s claims of being better for
the planet. Firefighters’ unions
across the country believe tall
wooden towers pose an unac-
ceptable fire risk.
“You’re replacing concrete
and steel with a flammable
material, that’s problematic,”
said Alan Ferschweil, head
of the Portland Fire Fighters
Union. He said a CLT build-
ing like Peavy — a three-story
structure — he has no issue
with. But a 12-story tower like
Framework should never have
been approved, he said, not-
ing that Portland Fire Bureau’s
tallest ladders can only reach
seven stories.
Developers
recently
scrapped plans for the first
cross-laminated timber tower
in Manhattan, citing finan-
cial reasons. But they folded
after the New York firefight-
ers’ unions signaled their
opposition.
“I spoke out against this
project out of concern for
the citizens and the firefight-
ers of the city of New York,”
said Jake Lemonda, presi-
dent of the United Fire Officer
Association.
As far as Oregon politi-
cal leaders are concerned, the
wood panels are sound. CLT
passed rigorous and repeated
flammability tests. So confi-
dent are state leaders of CLT
technology that in 2015 they
declared it “essential” to Ore-
gon’s economic interests. That
cleared the way for build-
ing code changes that culmi-
nated this month with the new
18-story limit.
There was another key con-
stituency with doubts about the
laminated timber. The folks
who own the mills and the
logs weren’t convinced of the
market demand. In November
2013, the Oregon State forestry
faculty invited prominent Van-
couver, B.C., architect Michael
Green to Corvallis to drum up
excitement. Green, who had
delivered stirring Ted Talks on
the advent of high-rise wooden
towers, wowed the 50 indus-
try executives in attendance
— including Valerie Johnson.
The second-generation presi-
dent of DR Johnson said it per-
suaded her to expand into the
new market.
Paul Barnum, former exec-
utive director of the Oregon
Forest Research Institute in
Portland, said the CLT move-
Walsh Construction, a long-
time general contractor in Port-
land, was thrilled in 2015 when
it was tapped to build Peavy
Hall. The job included building
its replacement and an adjoin-
ing Advanced Wood Prod-
ucts Lab totaling about 85,000
square feet. Estimated price
tag: $46 million.
But once it got a closer
look, Walsh had concerns
about the university’s reliance
on DR Johnson. The company
had just been making CLT pan-
els for a year and there was no
backup plan.
“DR Johnson has no pre-
vious experience with a CLT
project of this size and com-
plexity,” Walsh officials wrote
in an October 2016 memo to
university officials. “We know
that DR Johnson has recently
obtained and installed the
equipment to do this fabrica-
tion yet they have little expe-
rience with the equipment and
little experience with managing
the extensive coordination …
that precedes the production.”
But Oregon State was firm
about using DR Johnson. The
company, located deep in the
heart of Oregon’s ravaged
timber country, had fulfilled
the forestry faculty’s cher-
ished dream when it rolled
the dice and invested in CLT
fabrication.
The company declined
to disclose the amount of
its investment, but industry
experts say such plants can
cost $8 million to $30 million.
The state provided DR John-
son with a $100,000 loan for
the plant.
University officials make
no apologies for including lan-
guage in the architect’s bid
package that effectively gave
the job to DR Johnson. It only
makes sense for the school
to hire an Oregon company,
spokesman Steve Clark said.
The stipulation ruled out the
other CLT maker in the North-
west — Penticton, B.C.-based
StructureLam, which has been
in the business since 2011, four
years longer than DR John-
son. Penticton is more than 500
miles from Corvallis.
When it became clear the
university wouldn’t budge on
the supplier, Walsh pressed
for more money. It proposed
that Oregon State pay Walsh
1 percent per month interest
on all funds paid by Walsh to
subcontractors. Oregon State
refused and terminated Walsh.
It hired another Portland-based
general contractor, Andersen
Construction.
Oregon State agreed to pay
Andersen $63 million, 37 per-
cent more than it would have
paid Walsh, which university
officials attributed to escalating
construction costs.
Crews at construction sites
are accustomed to high-decibel
noises. Circular saws scream,
hammers bang and bulldozers
roar. But the thunderous crash
that emanated from Peavy’s
second floor on March 14 was
far outside the norm.
Workers who rushed to the
scene were met by a chilling
sight: One of the panels that
made up the second-floor ceil-
ing had come apart. A piece,
roughly 20- by 4-foot and
weighing half a ton, had col-
lapsed and fallen to the floor.
“I’d never heard of this hap-
pening before,” said Green,
the Canadian architect Oregon
State eventually hired to design
Peavy Hall. “It was absolutely
unsettling.”
In a March 19 memo to
university officials, Andersen
delivered the bad news.
“It appears that at least 2
CLT billets manufactured by
DR Johnson for the Peavy
structure have a fabrication
defect,” the company said.
“These two billets were cut
into six floor panels.”
What followed was a pro-
tracted and frustrating effort
to determine the extent of
the damage and a strategy to
resume construction. Because
CLT was so new, there was no
accepted protocol for testing.
DR Johnson fell on its
sword in April, publicly taking
responsibility for the bad pan-
els. An internal audit revealed
that crews had been instructed
“to warm the lumber in stacks
under tarps,” that were then
glued together to make the pan-
els. “Some temperature varia-
tions inadvertently caused pre-
mature curing of the adhesive,
resulting in poor bonding,” the
company said.
Johnson, the company pres-
ident, declined requests for an
interview.
Consult a
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DMD, FAGD
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1414 MARINE DRIVE,
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