Griffin Industries New Employee Building: This 2,800sf new building serves as the new employee facility and executive offices to Darling/Griffin Industries, one of Americas oldest and largest, innovative recycling facilities for food services. The ground up construction required Blakeland to coordinate with the administrative offices and plant operations, which operates every day of the year. The new building was in close proximity to the existing administrative building (appx4 feet), therefore site logistics including utilities (power, data, voice) had to be uninterrupted throughout our construction process. The existing plant operations had utilities that had had not been documented as the plant grew, therefore our pre-construction period included site forensics to determine existing and future utility feed. Our construction team correctly identified the systems in place and proposed varying from the septic and power design to better serve the current and future facility. We consulted with the local building authorities as well as local professionals (septic) to ensure the system proposed were appropriate for the local site conditions (water table, soil composition). The changes proposed by Blakeland were implemented and have been successful. The building itself is block, brick and truss construction with mid-range executive finishes. We were tasked to match the existing building brick (built over 20 years ago), which we were able to accomplish.  The mechanical systems were designed for the highly corrosive conditions (caused by plant operations and related chemicals) and we were able to propose adjustments to the mechanical components to improve the durability of the system. Completed ahead of schedule in April 2014.