Staying Grounded
i2 helps the SLC International Airport save a six-figure sum with innovative grounding design
Salt Lake City is doing something extraordinary: they are replacing their international airport—the terminal, concourses, roadways, parking, everything but the runways—with brand-new state-of-the art facilities, and they’re doing it without canceling a single flight.
It’s a change that’s sorely needed. As a Delta hub, the airport serves almost 22 million passengers each year, yet its patchwork of 29 airport buildings was built over the decades to accommodate less than half of that volume.
The $3.6 billion project is progressing in two phases, the first of which will be complete in September 2020, and the second in 2024. The old terminal will be phased out as the new one opens, leaving only concourses to be completed in Phase 2.
The city began planning for the new facilities back in the early 2000s, and the process included public hearings in which the number one request, according to Maureen Riley, Executive Director of Airports, was to incorporate better technology.
A crucial if little discussed part of any telecom system is its grounding, yet for a facility as large as this airport terminal, a traditional grounding backbone is expensive and far from ideal. At the suggestion of Ryan Kilber at WBT Performance Cabletray, Ludvik Electric approached us to design the grounding backbone.
The project was complex. There are 78 telecommunications rooms and two antenna farms spread out over four buildings, each of which had to be grounded and bonded properly.
We studied the project, inspected the site and proposed grounding the ITC systems to the new building’s steel frame, which has its own earth ground. The solution, which adheres to ANSI/TIA-607-C and BICSI-TDMM standards and the NFPA 70 and IEEE C2 codes, provides a safer, more effective, yet far less expensive ground than the alternative: running long-range, large-gauge 750 MCM conductors to all 78 rooms.
Our services included the grounding design itself, a design narrative and AutoCAD drawings.
Our client, Ludvik Electric, was very pleased with our solution, which saved them hundreds of thousands of dollars in labor and materials.
