Paul Pedini
Paul Pedini
Title: Vice President of Operations, Skanska USA Civil Northeast
Age: 60
Experience: 38 years
Swedish developer Skanska has a rapidly rising profile in Greater Boston as it completes trophy office buildings such as 101 Seaport, which recently sold for a record $452 million. Those projects tend to overshadow the work of its civil engineering unit, Skanska USA Civil. Since opening a Cambridge office in 2013, it’s participated in some of the region’s largest infrastructure projects, including the Longfellow Bridge rehabilitation project and reconfiguration of the Kendall Generating Station steam plant in Cambridge. Paul Pedini, who heads the Cambridge office, is already looking ahead to additional opportunities for Skanska at major projects like the Allston I-90 Interchange redesign.
Q: What’s been Skanska’s recent focus in Boston on the civil side?
A: Transportation has been the center of our activities here. On the civil side, we didn’t have a permanent presence until recently. On the building side, it was the Porter Square station; we did a couple of big jobs for the Central Artery project and the MWRA. We decided a few years ago, in 2013, to start a permanent civil presence.
Q: What are your largest current projects?
A: We have Longfellow Bridge replacement, Fore River Bridge, the Green Line Extension, and the MBTA/Keolis commuter rail station funded by New Balance as part of their world headquarters (at Boston Landing in Brighton).
We’re doing the foundation for 121 Seaport, which is one of the Skanska’s developments. That’s interesting because it abuts the Silver Line Extension, so it’s very sensitive. We’re doing an up-down method where we install a slurry wall and internal columns. As we build down, they’re building a tower going up. It’s a fast way to do it, but it’s very complex. Under each column of the tower, there’s an individual foundation. As we dig down, we put the floors of the garage in and they act as bracing levels. And then they build a tower up at the same time. Conventionally, you’d go all the way to the bottom, and then start building up.
Q: What are the challenges on the Kendall Cogeneration station project?
A: Our charge was to make changes to facilitate the new cooling system to condense the steam and supplant the current system which extracts water from the Charles River and puts it back in. The challenges we faced were that it’s a very constricted site. You could not set up machines to work off Land Boulevard and Memorial Drive. That’s just out of the question. You have water on the other side. We had to work within the active plant. We had a very narrow area between two buildings and underneath it was a utility bridge. It’s like building a ship in a bottle. You have to get everything through a very small opening and not impact the plant’s operations.
The building structure is not capable of sustaining the loads we put on it, so we had to build a new roof system. We decided to prefabricate the roof. We would truck in these big sections and lift them with a 400-ton crane and drop them on a set of beams and slide them into position the length of a football field. The whole system is installed in a matter of weeks, as opposed to months if it was stick-built. Kendall is important because it provides steam and heat for Massachusetts General Hospital. That’s always a good motivation for us.
Q: What’s the latest completion date for the Longfellow Bridge replacement and what were the tricky construction issues that arose once construction started?
A: December 2018. The building technology since the original bridge was built in 1907 has changed quite a bit. One of the most vexing issues has been the rivets. We were tasked with learning how to rivet. We haven’t had a rivet driven in this city in 60 years. So we had to go out to Seattle to find people who actually knew how to do it, to get trained. We started to see other phenomenon related to building a state-of-the-art bridge on top of an ancient foundation. The masonry foundation is still in pretty good shape, and is sitting on wood piles, but we had to seismically retrofit the piles to make them resistant to earthquakes.
As far as the steel above, the only thing we kept were the steel arches. To remove all the steel above the arch and bring new steel in, we quickly realized the two aren’t going to line up very well. Today’s methods allow you to be very precise, whereas the art of riveting allows a certain amount of misalignment. It was perfectly good to keep the bridge together but it makes it very difficult to coordinate reconstruction. We had a schedule issue where instead of doing all that work ahead of time, we had to wait until the steel above the arches was demolished to find out where those holes were. We developed a technology using an optical handheld scanner. We could be down below and scan it remotely with what looks like a selfie stick. That scan would generate a CAD drawing which could be transferred to the fabricator. You’re taking the potential for human error out of it.
Pedini’s Five Favorite Restaurants:
- Row 34
- Bondir
- Alden & Harlow
- Coppa
- Redbones
