The U.S. Pacific island territory of Guam is undergoing a massive transformation as part of a multi-billion-dollar realignment of Okinawa-based U.S. Marines throughout the Pacific. Once completed, the new Marine Corps Base Guam will be in the village of Dededo, but supporting facilities are being constructed at various locations around the island. One such facility is the first U.S. Marine Corps aviation support and maintenance hangar on Guam and is located at the North Ramp of Andersen Air Force Base. The new hangar is a 72,500-square-foot, $53.7 million facility that supports Marine Corps aviation squadrons. The project was delivered by Naval Facilities Engineering System Command as a design-build procurement. Designing for resiliency is essential on this remote island – regularly subjected to strong typhoons, large earthquakes, and a highly corrosive tropical environment. Equally important is ensuring the design can be efficiently constructed using limited available local labor and resources.

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The U.S. territory of Guam is a small, 210-square-mile island in the western Pacific Ocean with a population of 169,000 residents. Guam is home to one of the harshest building environments in the world. The nearby subduction of one major tectonic plate under another along the Mariana Trench creates frequent and intense earthquakes. The resulting design spectral accelerations are similar in intensity to those present in more familiar earthquake hotspots like Los Angeles. Guam also finds itself situated in “Typhoon Alley,” an area of the western Pacific Ocean that experiences the highest frequency of tropical cyclones on earth, four times more active than similar areas in the Atlantic Ocean.

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Imagine reading the front page of your daily newspaper to find out the current bed availability or the number of people on the waiting list for the only hospital in town. Now imagine it is a necessary announcement because this hospital is almost always at full capacity and that the next closest U.S. hospital is an eight-hour plane ride away. Fluctuating hospital availability has been the reality on the remote U.S. island territory of Guam. …