Sky bridges tied the West Tower at Wyoming Medical Center to an occupied hospital while the tower rose four stories with 46 patient rooms and about 750 tons of structural steel. That job shows what building beside a live facility demands: the steel goes up, the patients keep coming, and every crane pick, noise, dust cloud and utility shutdown has to be planned with the people inside. We do that kind of work in Casper, and we plan it before we pick up a shovel.
Phased construction means building in stages so that part of the facility stays in use while another part is under construction. It applies to hospitals, schools and colleges, airports, plants, retail centers and offices. The hard part is rarely the building. It is access, safety, noise, dust, utilities and communication, and the owner's operations come first.
Owners sometimes ask whether phasing is worth the trouble compared with a clean shutdown, and the honest answer depends on what a closed week costs them. We price both and let the numbers decide. We assume nothing about how an owner runs the building. Our first step is to learn the operation: shift patterns, peak periods, critical rooms, emergency routes and shutdown windows. The phasing plan comes from that, not from the contractor's convenience.
We draw the phasing plan with the owner's facility manager, safety officer and department heads. Each phase has a defined work area, a protected path for staff and visitors, a laydown area, a crew parking plan and a schedule that identifies disruptive tasks in advance. The plan says which utilities will be shut, for how long, and who signs off before they are restored.
Communication is part of the plan, and so is the exit. Every phase ends with a walk-through, a cleaning, a restored finish and a written release back to the owner, so space returns to service the day we promised. Weekly look-aheads, a single contact for the owner and a way to flag noise or dust problems the same day keep small complaints from growing into schedule risks. We would rather hear about a problem at seven in the morning than read about it in a letter.
Occupied buildings require physical separation: hard barriers, sealed penetrations, negative air machines where needed, walk-off mats, dust control and clearly marked routes. In health care, infection control risk assessments set the standard, and we follow them. In schools and colleges, we separate construction access from student paths and keep fire exits and alarms working.
Noise and vibration follow the owner's calendar. Drilling, demolition and concrete saw cutting are scheduled for off hours when the owner needs it, even if that costs more in overtime. Casper Mountain wind adds another factor: dust can travel, so we keep spoil covered, wet down work areas and check neighboring air intakes before opening up a wall.
Industrial owners schedule shutdowns around turnarounds, and tie-ins have to happen inside those windows. The Casper refinery at 5700 East Highway 20-26 completed a two-year, roughly $200 million modernization reported in October 2016, with a new crude unit, new tanks and a gas-fired heating plant, and the refinery then employed 145 people plus contractors. A site like that does not give a contractor unlimited access, and the work has to fit the owner's outage calendar.
We build the schedule backward from those windows. Materials arrive early, prefabrication happens off site where possible, and the crew rehearses the tie-in before the outage. Where a utility shutdown is only a few hours, we stage every part in advance and assign people to each step. It is the way to meet long-lead procurement dates and still finish on time.
The Casper-Natrona County airport logged 43,126 operations in 2022, 71 percent of them general aviation, with 131 based aircraft. Anything built on airport grounds happens next to moving aircraft, so work areas, crane heights, haul routes and lighting follow airport rules and require coordination with operations. The airport's new air traffic control tower, at 157 feet, replaces a 50-foot tower built in 1954 and is expected to finish in early 2028, which shows how long a phased airport project can run.
The same discipline applies on a smaller scale. Whether we build at the airport or at a plant with forklift traffic, the work area has to be defined, controlled and communicated. Contractors who treat that as paperwork get stopped by a safety officer sooner or later. We use badges, escorts, flaggers and daily briefings, and we stop work when conditions change.
A hospital or clinic cannot close. A school cannot lose classrooms in session, so work often takes place in summer or in stages around the academic calendar. Casper College occupies more than 200 acres and 28 buildings, and a campus with that many buildings can be renovated one at a time without stopping instruction. We coordinate with education institutions and build to their calendars.
Offices, retail and industrial sites each have their own constraints. Retail owners need entries open for customers, and plant owners need production lines running. Our renovation and adaptive reuse and tenant improvements work often takes place inside an operating building, and phasing is how we keep the doors open.
Send us the floor plans, the operating hours and the areas that cannot shut down. We will propose a phasing plan, a barrier plan and a schedule. Use the quote form or call us.
Usually yes, with a plan. We define phases, protect routes and separate construction from operations. The cost depends on how much of the building stays in service and how tightly the work must be controlled.
Hard barriers, sealed penetrations, negative air where required, wet cutting, vacuum tools and scheduled quiet hours. We also monitor and respond to complaints the same day, because small problems in an occupied building become large ones quickly.
We write a shutdown plan for each outage: scope, duration, steps, responsible people, backup power if needed and a restore sequence. The owner approves it in advance, and we prepare and stage everything before the shutdown begins.
Yes. Smaller work areas, off-hours labor, extra protection and longer schedules add cost. The savings come from the owner not having to relocate or close, which often outweighs the premium.
It happens often. We keep the plan flexible, revise it in writing and tell you what a change does to cost and schedule. A good phasing plan can adapt without starting over.