Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/354800
Canada Post Pacific Processing Centre by Tiffany Sloan ALL IMAGES COURTESY CANADA POST / POSTES CANADA C anada Post is changing with the times, and its Postal Transforma- tion program, which kicked off in 2008, is dramatically modernizing operations and facilities across Canada for the nearly 150-year-old institution. "Our business is changing as e-com- merce grows, and parcels are an impor- tant part of our future," says Canada Post's VP of engineering Bill Davidson, who led the Postal Transformation program in Western Canada. But Vancouver's 56-year-old pro- cessing centre in the heart of downtown wasn't built for that. "For many years now, we've had two sites – we sorted letters downtown and parcels in the Vancouver suburb of Richmond, plus we had to open a third facility in Richmond for three months a year during the holi- day season." The obvious choice was to consoli- date operations in a single, new facility strategically located next to the Van- couver International Airport in Rich- mond – one with the capacity to handle the volume of mail processed on the West Coast. "So we looked at the most efficient way to process the products in our future," says Davidson, "and then – architecturally and engineering-wise – wrapped those processes in a building." That building is the Canada Post Pacific Processing Centre ( PPC), total- ling a massive 700,000 square feet. It houses 74 high dock bays for shipping and delivery, and its walls are virtu- ally nothing but rows of doors – 106 in total – to accommodate delivery trucks. A two-storey office area houses admin- istrative staff, but the building is best described as a shell, protecting the staggering complexity of sophisticated equipment and technology inside. And whereas mail sorting in Van- couver has been a primarily manual and labour-intensive task, the new PPC boasts a state-of-the-art level of auto- mation. Put end to end, the conveyor belts alone would stretch a distance of about 10 kilometres. "Think of it as a race track all around the plant, with products moving onto it and off of it," says Davidson. "It's the most integrated and auto- mated plant that Canada Post has, and probably in the world," he adds. What makes the building even more impressive is how fast it was completed – just 30 months. And because much of the processing equipment needed to be integrated into the building, to speed things along, Canada Post's vendors were beginning installation long before final occupancy, explains Bregje Kozak, MHPM Project Managers Inc. principal. It was a unique process of complet- ing a section of the building, handing it over to Canada Post so its vendors could install the equipment, and then handing it back to the design-builder to finish off the base building items that remained, such as sprinklers and other systems that had to be co-ordinated with the processing equipment, says Kozak. The project was split into five milestones or phases, the first of which comprised 200,000 square feet and had to be com- pleted within just 11 months of award- ing the project. "Adding to the complexity of the proj- ect, we had about 15,000 square feet of program space dedicated to the Canada Border Services Agency [ CBSA]," says Ajaz Hasan, associate at Kasian Archi- tecture Interior Design and Planning. As Canada's gateway to the Pacific Rim, every package that comes in from Asia Pacific must go through CBSA's security screening process. "And as par t of CBSA's securit y mandate, this area essentially had to be designed as a building within a building," explains Hasan. Perforated steel sheets line the inside of every common wall that CBSA shares with the rest of the facility, and every air duct or plumbing opening more than one-foot wide has been outfitted with burglar bars. The PPC is targeting LEED Silver cer- tification. "It's kind of 'table stakes' in the industry these days to be as sus- tainable as possible," says Scott Doug- las, senior principal at Kasian. "And the sheer size of the building just magni- fies the importance of making good decisions with respect to energy and consumables," from an efficient build- ing envelope to high-efficiency HVAC equipment. "Electrically, it was ver y compli- cated, what with the densit y of the outlet requirement s, and the foot- candle lighting levels in the plant and the surrounding parking areas being higher t han normally required to serve the employees," says Rod Doug- las, business development manager with Nightingale Electrical Ltd. "And Canada Post required redundancy in the distribution, so we had four unit Canada Post Pacific Processing Centre