ALL ABOARD WITH BOMEL CONSTRUCTION

FULLERTON, June 19, 2012

The general contractor today completed its fifth parking structure at a Southern California mass-transit station. Construction of the Fullerton Transportation Center Parking Structure also included a 150-foot-long pedestrian bridge next to passenger and freight train tracks and above a heavily traveled Harbor Boulevard in Orange County.

Many people in California don’t realize it, but Bomel Construction Co., a 42-year-old concrete contractor based in Anaheim Hills, plays a significant role in their daily lives.

Bomel Construction has built parking structures at many colleges, malls and casinos. Bomel-built parking structures serve people working or visiting office buildings and civic centers. At several mass transportation stations in Orange and Los Angeles counties, Bomel-built parking structures provide commuters with a convenient, safe and shaded spot to leave their vehicles.

The most recent mass transit example is in Downtown Fullerton, where Bomel today finished a four-level parking structure complex that serves bus and rail commuters using the Fullerton Transportation Center, the busiest station in Orange County. The 813-stall parking garage is located at the southwest corner of Santa Fe Avenue and Harbor Boulevard.

The $13.5 million garage is necessary for a number of reasons. With the cost of gasoline spiking in the last several years, ridership at the Amtrak and Metrolink train station has shot up, resulting in more people driving to the station and needing a safe spot to park for the day. Downtown Fullerton in the past decade has experienced a dramatic revival after years in decline and now sports a dense cluster of nightclubs, restaurants and shops, many of which occupy space built during the first half of the 1900s. The new 263,000-square-foot garage will keep downtown visitors and commuters from spending time and gas circling around several blocks looking for that hard-to-find parking spot or leaving the area altogether when they cannot find a place to park.

Far from being a run-of-the-mill parking garage, the Fullerton parking structure has engaging details, including large way finding signage; an LED sign that advises visitors how many spaces are available on each level; old-fashioned, jelly-jar-style street lighting; and red brick façades that mimic the exterior of many of the vintage commercial buildings still standing––and providing goods and services––in the neighborhood.

The steel-mesh-covered pedestrian bridge was built with wide-flange steel beams and is attached to the existing train-track bridge. Electrical signage and surveillance cameras complement a colored-concrete walkway.

Kasey Shay, Bomel’s project manager, said building a 150-foot-long pedestrian bridge that connects the garage with the transit station required working the graveyard shift and closing down Harbor Boulevard in the process.

“Building the bridge near operating Burlington Northern and Metrolink train tracks was a major effort,” Shay said. “We could only do our work––erecting steel, welding, doing formwork, pouring concrete and adding lights and signage––in the middle of the night. We didn’t want to erect steel over moving cars on Harbor Boulevard, which would have been the case if we performed the work with lane closures.”

Parrish Dyer, project manager with Laguna Beach-based Griffith Structures, the project’s construction management company, appreciated Bomel’s performance.

“Every project has its challenges, but overall, it was a great success,” Dyer said. “Bomel put together a great team.”

About Bomel Construction Co.: Established in 1970, Anaheim Hills, Calif.-based Bomel Construction was recently ranked by McGraw-Hill Construction as the largest concrete contractor in California. Bomel also is one of the largest concrete contractors in the United States. The design-build contractor has completed parking structures and performed structural concrete work for municipalities, casinos, stadiums and large-scale commercial, retail and institutional projects throughout the western U.S. In 2011, Bomel established an architectural concrete contracting division to satisfy the needs of that market. In addition to the corporate office in Anaheim Hills, Bomel has regional offices in Carlsbad and Las Vegas.

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