Alfa Aesar, Haverhill, Massachusetts Facilities

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The principal of Castagna Consulting Group has been associated with Johnson Matthey since building its first Chemical distribution facility in Haverhill Massachusetts in 1989. Castagna Consulting Group was retained by Johnson Matthey as Program Manager for the design and construction of a 35,000SF chemical storage warehouse near their present facility in Haverhill. The project started with a real estate search for the facility, only a few possibilities were viable options because the operation needed to be near the existing facility. The site is an existing 15,000SF warehouse with approvals to add an additional 18,000SF. Negotiations with the building owner were finalized in May of 2005. Basic concept design was started in November of 2004 and finalized once the site was secure The facility is a high hazard storage facility for Flammable liquids, Flammable Solids, Corrosive and Oxidizer classified chemicals. Over 5,000 different chemicals are housed in the facility. The flammable liquids and solids are explosion proof environments with chemical resistant materials on the floors and walls. The Flammable liquids room has a 3 foot pit under an epoxy coated steel grid and FRP floor system. The suppression system is an AFFF Foam system. UV/IR detectors act as early warning in case of an incident. The building is completely diked, housing a possible 250,000gal of liquid. Each hazard room is self contained with 3 and 4 hour rated walls. The heating and ventilation system is state of the art allowing 6 air changes per hour and reacting to self containment of any room with a problem and isolating it from the rest of the facility. The MEP control systems allow the fire department to manually control the systems from an isolated control panel including manual releases of smoke hatches, mechanically ventilating a room with an incident ongoing, or do nothing and let the buildings systems control the situation. The safeguards give the fire department a window of time sufficient enough so lives are not put in harm’s way if a problem arises. The project began July, 2005 and was complete May, 2006