BANGOR – A local firm and an Alaskan company have partnered and received a $13 million contract to replace an aircraft parking apron at the Maine Air National Guard base.

CCI Inc. of Anchorage, Alaska, is collaborating with Lane Construction Corp. to tear up the 15-year-old concrete aircraft parking apron and replace it and the underground fuel lines and drainage pipes, said Lt. Col. David Vashon, the base engineer in Bangor.

“We had realized the ramp was coming to the end of its useful life,” Vashon said, as he described the cracks in the approximately 500-foot-by-1,700-foot concrete parking area. Once construction is complete, the perimeter of the lot will be 19 inches of asphalt and the internal 150-by-1,500-foot rectangle will be 18 inches of concrete.

CCI Inc. will primarily be managers on the project, Vashon said, and he expects the equipment, materials and construction personnel will be local. While the CCI Inc. headquarters is in Anchorage, Alaska, the general contracting company has an eastern office in Augusta. CCI met the rigid National Guard requirements and specifications, and has a history for completing military-related jobs, specifically at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, Vashon said.

“Almost all of the money will stay in Maine,” he said.

The Bangor base has been on a waiting list to fund the project for about three years, Vashon said. The first two phases of the project will occur this construction season and the $13 million is from the 2008 Air National Guard’s Facilities Sustainment, Restoration and Modernization fund. The final phase of construction should be completed in the summer of 2009 and be part of next year’s budget.

The parking apron, commonly referred to as the Tukey or Whiskey ramp, is located to the east of the Bangor International Airport runway and has 10 parking spaces for the base’s KC-135 Stratotankers.

When the parking apron was constructed 15 years ago, the base tested the concrete for strength and flexibility, but this time potential contractors were asked to provide up to 200 concrete samples that were tested for durability and cracking.

“We should have gotten more time out of [the apron], but we use more chemicals,” Vashon said. “There is this [national] push and pressure to get airplanes in the air because people don’t want to be inconvenienced.”

Cracking can be exacerbated by the plane and runway de-icing chemicals, which the Guard uses in winter months to stay operational, Vashon said. To better handle the de-icing runoff, the reconstructed apron will include a more sophisticated runoff system that will divert contaminated water to appropriate tanks and ensure clean water is not treated as wastewater.

In a joint statement released Monday, Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins said the upgrades would strengthen Bangor’s proposal to receive the Air Force’s latest tanker aircraft, a new airplane hangar and an associate active duty unit. Col. Scott Young, mission support officer at the Bangor base, said the request to fix the apron is unrelated to the pitch for new facilities and active duty airmen.

The Guard parks larger aircraft than the proposed tanker on the apron daily, so there is no concern about its ability to hold the planes, Young said.

“We always keep an eye to the future,” he said. “We are studying this ramp for what the Air Force could buy as a tanker for the future.”

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