The city of Lynn’s finest soon will be getting a new home to the tune of $12.5 million.
The new police station in Lynn, MA, located approximately 15 mi. north of Boston, was in the design and approval process for six years when work finally began in August 2003. The four-story brick facility will cover 80,000 sq. ft. and feature additional parking. The project is slated for completion this April.
For this job, J & J Contractors Inc., a large general contractor based in Lowell, MA, has been charged with the duties of all site work, site clearing and utility work, as well as the actual construction of the facility. J & J also demolished two buildings on the site to make room for the new station.
According to William Bartlett, site superintendent of J & J Contractors, excavation at the site has been relatively light for the Massachusetts area, which is renowned for its solid rock, although he did confess to needing to perform some minor blasting on the site to break up a few large boulders.
Bartlett admitted that a major challenge has been working in what has been proven to be a very tight and confined work area.
“There’s not a lot of room for the machines to operate,” he said. “Simply getting truckloads of dirt in and out of the site has been a logistical nightmare. Construction equipment has to be rotated around the site from spot to spot in order to open up areas to work.”
In all, J & J has excavated and removed 30,000 tons (27,000 t) of dirt — most of it contaminated — from the site and has installed of all the utilities, including 400 to 500 ft. (122 to 152 m) of drainage pipe, six manholes and all sewer connections.
To accomplish all this, J & J sought to rent the right tools from South Boston’s Tools-4-Hire. “We’ve had some experience in working with Tools-4-Hire on prior projects,” Bartlett said, “but we’re currently using more and more of their equipment for a higher percentage of our total rental needs.”
The lineup of equipment that J & J has rented for this project include a Daewoo Mega 400 4-yd. (3.6 m) loader with a 4-yd. bucket, a Dynapac CA250, a Liebherr 944 excavator, a IHI 35J mini-excavator, Multiquip reversing plate compactors, a Lay-Mor walk-behind sweeper, New Holland backhoes and skid steers, Lull lifts, as well as many other smaller pieces of equipment.
J & J’s rented, but new Daewoo has really been put through its paces in the heavy clay that dominates the site, but according to Bartlett, the machine has performed trouble-free despite having a “tremendous number of hours put on it.”
The Dynapac CA250, which has performed all of the grading and compaction work, also has operated trouble-free, according to Bartlett.
For Bartlett and J & J Contractors, Tools-4-Hire has become a one-stop rental shop for all the company’s needs.
“They [Tools-4-Hire] have such a wide assortment of equipment from which you can get virtually anything you need for a project — whether it’s a 12-ton roller, wheelbarrows, duct tape, on up to a 75,000-lb. excavator.
“And they service us very well,” Bartlett continued. “Anytime that I call Brian Smith, our sales contact at Tool-4-Hire, I get a very quick and positive response, and nearly every time he can get done for me what I am asking him to do … He never leaves me hanging on a project. We have yet to have a single problem with any of the machines that we’ve rented from Tools-4-Hire; they’re all cleaned, serviced, low hours and ready to go to work when they arrive on our site.”
J & J Contractors was founded in 1997 by Kam Patel, who, prior to going into business for himself, worked as a site supervisor of a large New England construction firm. Across New England, J & J has become noted for its work on building new schools for the State of Massachusetts, as well as its federal government building projects.
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