The First LEED Silver-certified Barracks for the U.S. Navy
Tetra Tech served as the general contractor and designer of record for the new bachelor quarters completed on the only permanent U.S. military base on the African continent, Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, Africa.
The ribbon-cutting ceremony on June 15, 2015, was a huge milestone for the United States in the Horn of Africa. Tetra Tech also achieved more than one million hours with no lost time to injuries and accidents on this project.
This is the first U.S. Navy construction project on the African continent to meet LEED Silver criteria. The U.S. Naval Facilities Engineering Command Europe Africa Southwest Asia selected Tetra Tech to provide design and construction for the entire project. The design employed insulated concrete forms (ICF) to increase energy efficiency and indoor environmental quality while also reducing construction waste. The ICF system provides outstanding thermal performance, contributing to the facility’s 37 percent energy reduction target. The new three-story quarters will provide comfortable living arrangements for service members deployed to Djibouti. The quarters include fully furnished double-occupancy rooms, private showers and toilets, walk-in closets, public laundry room, public recreational room, public patios, and lounges. The architectural theme was chosen to reflect the historical local architecture. The façade, broken up both horizontally and vertically, creates individual building blocks that characteristically reflect the traditional width-to-height proportions of structures in the area.
The project’s solar-heated water system takes advantage of the area’s approximately 3,200 hours of sunshine each year and will meet 50 percent of the facility’s hot water demand. It will offset 6.5 percent of the total energy costs through renewable energy generated on-site. Potable water use has been reduced by 42 percent through dual-flush toilets, 60-second metered faucets, and 1.5-GPM-flow-rate showers. In addition, the site landscaping will be watered using 100 percent greywater from the bachelor quarter’s showers and lavatories.
The contract also included installing new containerized living units (CLUs) and relocating and retrofitting existing CLUs into triple stack configuration, all with utilities connection, access stairways, and walkways.
Read more about the project here.