Firm builds testing lab at new facility

The company – with a headquarters in Springfield and a lab in Fayetteville, Ark. – moved its Joplin division into the former Missouri Steel Castings building in late 2006.

According to Jerrod Hogan, associate surveyor, the bottom floor of the former Missouri Steel building was to be used as a testing lab for the company. About a month into their move, however, Hogan said Empire District Electric Co. began conversations about moving in one of their divisions into the lower floor of the building.

Anderson Engineering reached an agreement with Empire, and the two companies began working on developing two new buildings to the east of the former Missouri Steel Castings building to house a lab for Anderson Engineering and a garage for some of Empire’s trucks.

“We had hoped to be finished by now,” Hogan said of the two buildings. “The plans were drawn up in January, but we didn’t get started until April.”

Hogan said Hunter & Miller served as architect for the project, and Four State Homes, which did the renovations of the former Missouri Steel Castings building, was contracted for the new buildings as well.

The two new buildings have a price tag of about $700,000, and the total cost of renovating the Missouri Steel Castings building and building the lab and garage comes to about $1.7 million, Hogan said.

The garage, which is 7,125 square feet, will house some of Empire’s trucks. The lab, which is about 3,150 square feet, will be the new home for Anderson’s testing lab.

Siegfried “Zig” Tarnowieckyi, vice president of the company and laboratory manager, said it will be nice to move into the new lab because it’s three-times larger than the lab he works out of on 15th Street.

“We’ll probably hire at least two people,” Tarnowieckyi said. “Basically it will be used as a drilling and geotechnical testing lab.”

Tarnowieckyi said the lab will mostly be used to test soil, concrete, and construction material for jobs contracted to Anderson Engineering.

He said those tests include a variety of steps, including taking samples from work sites to test for moisture content, bearing strengths and hydrometer and density readings.

“That information then comes to the engineers to help them with their site grading plan,” Tarnowieckyi said. “Depending on the size of the building, we can drill anywhere from 15-feet into the soil or all the way to rock and take core samples to be tested.”

The lab will include five rooms — an office for the surveyors, an office for Tarnowieckyi, a receptionist room, a curing room that is environmentally-controlled, and a larger “dirty room” for much of the concrete testing. Hogan said the curing room has to be sealed in order to control the environment so that samples can be tested through different stages.

Hogan said both buildings will be complete by Oct. 12, and Tarnowieckyi said he hopes to move into the lab by Oct. 15. Empire will lease the garage from Anderson Engineering, just as it leases the bottom floor of the former Missouri Steel Castings building.

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