By Adam Swift
The general contractor provided an update on the current work at the new high school during last week’s Revere High School Building Committee.
The $400 million-plus, four-story school at Wonderland is being paid for in part through a grant from the Massachusetts School Building Authority and is scheduled to open in January of 2029.
“Starting … late last month, we have been working to create the working platform that we would use to mobilize the rig on top of to start drilling ground improvements,” said Darren Peeler of project general contractor Consigli Construction.
Peeler said there has been intense effort recently to qualify the characteristics of the dirt on site so that it can be legally removed from the project site. That would allow the building prep and foundation work to get underway, he said.
“The process has been fairly arduous,” said Peeler. “We are in the process of getting packages assembled by (environmental consultant) Sanborn, Head, and then they will resubmit those packages.”
With the approval, the dirt will be able to be shipped off site to a qualified facility. Peeler noted that with the soil removal package approval, there will be a lot of trucks entering and leaving the work site to remove that soil.
“There are a lot of piles of dirt out there,” Peeler said at last week’s meeting. “The good news is that those piles are the result of us getting the pad prepped so that we can start the building foundation work. The first thing we have to do is cut the pad and then we start with getting a low-transfer platform … we would create a new platform underneath the building pad that will allow us to start ground improvements in the building pad.”
Following ground improvements in the building pad starts the process of excavating for foundations, Peeler said.
The original outlook was that the foundation excavation would start in April.
“We are trying to bring that date in as much as we can,” said Peeler. “Right now, the outlook is that we may be able to start the ground improvements in February, as opposed to March, which then in turn allows us to bring the foundations excavation and start foundations hopefully into March.
“What’s critical to us is getting the supportive excavation around the building in place, which are the (steel) sheets that we drive in all the way around the perimeter of the building,” said Peeler. “We drive those sheets in and we create basically a dam that prevents water, because we are at sea level, from getting into the areas within the building footprint so that we can build the foundation.”
Behind the scenes, Peeler said the contractor is in the process of reviewing the structural steel for the project.
“The steel subcontractor has … a very large portion of the raw steel that has been purchased and is in their yard,” said Peeler. “We are in the process of working with the design team to get the first batch of shop drawings approved over the next month so that we can get started with fabrication.”
