THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, July 29, 1994 TAG: 9407280186
SECTION: PORTSMOUTH CURRENTS PAGE: 10 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Cover Story
SOURCE: BY IDA KAY JORDAN, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 165 lines
A POST OFFICE becomes a library. A department store is transformed into a museum. A YMCA is converted to luxury apartments. A funeral home houses a social hall.
But what do you do with a concrete water tank built to hold 2 million gallons of water?
It was easy for Rick Pino.
Pino had no trouble seeing an abandoned round concrete structure as home of Mechanical Research and Design Corp., his custom manufacturing business that makes metal pipe test plugs.
``Nobody said I was crazy, but they just couldn't see it,'' he said. ``This place is big enough for a hockey rink with bleachers!''
Abandoned by the city in 1985 because it was leaking 285 gallons a minute, the water tank sits on about three acres on Ballard Road, almost directly behind the National Guard Armory on Elmhurst Lane.
The dome-shaped building with eight-inch-thick walls contains 15,000 square feet of floor space and at one time held 16.7 million pounds of water. Pino uses 6,000 square feet for his business and hopes to lease the remaining 9,000 to other companies.
His space is separated from the remainder of the building by a cinder block wall.
To build the wall in the tallest part of the tank, where the roof is some 29 feet from the floor, Pino used about 5,000 cinder blocks.
At this point, Pino has invested an undisclosed amount of money in the project. He has about two acres he can sell off between the tank and Laigh Road.
He bought the building and land from the city through Portsmouth Redevelopment and Housing Authority for $20,000. PRHA had estimated it would spend up to $100,000 just tearing down the concrete and putting in utilities in order to sub-divide the land and sell smaller parcels.
Instead, PRHA opted to let the building and land go ``as is'' to get both back on the city's tax rolls.
``Otherwise, it was non-productive property,'' said Marsha McVey of PRHA.
Pino, an engineer, seemed to enjoy recycling the building.
The structure was ``built like an egg,'' he said.
Pre-stressed concrete walls, eight inches thick, stand on pilings. A diamond-bladed saw was used to cut holes in the walls for doors and windows.
``It was no threat to the wall,'' Pino said. ``The man who did it knew what he was doing.''
The most expensive part of the building conversion, he said, was dealing with the floor that had caused the original leaks.
``Water leaked out but it also leaked in,'' Pino said. ``The floor was 18 inches below ground and at one time there was more than an inch of water in the building.''
After hauling in tons of crushed stone to fill the space between the original floor and a new floor 20 inches above it, Pino poured a concrete slab floor.
The building was one of two tanks of that design ever built in the country, Public Utilities Director Jim Spacek said.
``I wasn't here, but I understand it began to leak soon after it was put into service in 1965,'' he said.
The city apparently tried to stop the leak in the tank floor, first by putting Bentonite slurry under it, Spacek said.
``That's clay that swells and then becomes waterproof,'' he said. ``That didn't work so then they put in a partial rubber liner.''
When the liner leaked, the city pumped concrete grout under the building.
``None of it worked,'' Spacek said. ``At one time it was losing a quarter of a million gallons a day.''
Because of the constant water loss, Spacek brought in a structural engineer to make an assessment.
``When the report came back, we looked at the cost of rehabilitation and we were talking $1 million in repairs to replace the roof and pour a new floor,'' he said.
A deciding factor to abandon the tank was that it was in ``the wrong place,'' Spacek said.
``When they built it in the mid-60s, it appeared that the growth in Portsmouth would be in that direction,'' he said. ``But that never happened.''
Originally, the city had planned to put a second water storage tank at the same site abutting the century-old water main from Suffolk.
``But, by the 1980s, our long-range plans showed we needed tanks at Broad Street, Churchland and another one downtown,'' he said. ``The intentions were good when the city built the Ballard Avenue tank but the annexation and growth just never materialized.''
Over the past year, a 2.5 million-gallon tank on Broad Street has been constructed at a cost of $1.9 million and is scheduled for completion in October.
``I think we'll need one in Churchland next,'' Spacek said. ``But we didn't need one on Ballard Avenue.''
Although the city paid no taxes to itself on the reservoir, it was on the books for $425,000, said Stephen Creech, of the City Assessor's office.
The recycled building is back on the tax books, assessed at $104,000 and the land is assessed at $68,430.
Adjustments to the assessment were made because Pino hasn't finished the unoccupied part of the building.
``When he does, the assessment will go up,'' Creech said.
Pino, 41, is originally from Long Island. He traveled the country as a construction project manager for a company that does a lot of work for municipalities and their utilities departments.
``I built a couple of plants here and decided I wanted to stay,'' he said. ``So I started a consultant business.''
As it turned out, he was hired as a consultant by Steve Satterwaithe, who was running the pipe plug business started by his father about 16 years ago.
``I bought the business in 1990,'' Pino said. ``And it's been growing over the past four years.''
Pino has only one full-time employee, Tom Sykes of Virginia Beach. Sykes has been with the company since its inception.
The plugs, designed and made by the two men, are used mainly by utilities companies when they want to isolate a segment of pipe for testing.
``We sell them all over the world,'' Pino said. ``We make them from four inches to 15 feet across.''
Municipal utilities and nuclear power plants are the largest users of plugs, which are used to stop liquids flowing through water, oil and toxic waste lines to enable testing and repairs.
``We do irregular shapes and non-standard sizes,'' Pino said. ``The customers tell us their application and we design, make and test all our products.''
The plugs go in underwater and underground.
``Hampton Roads Sanitation District has two of every size plug we've ever made,'' he said. ``They have almost more than we do. But when they need one, they have it.''
Cities, he said, would be wise to keep on hand plugs for pipes that are apt to spring leaks.
``But most of them don't want to make the investment,'' he added.
Because the plugs frequently are needed for emergencies, Pino and Sykes are used to working long hours some days to turn out a custom plug.
However, because plugs larger than 18 inches are fabricated rather than cast, they can take longer.
``An 84-inch plug could take three weeks and cost $30,000,'' Pino said.
A hot item for Pino is a reactor steam line plug that General Electric buys from him and sells all over the world.
``They were told by others it couldn't be done, but we worked to make it safe by allowing a plug to be inserted without exposing a worker to radioactive materials,'' he said. ``If somebody says it can't be done, we're challenged.''
The reactor steam line plug saves seven days on a shutdown schedule for a nuclear power plant, he said.
``When you save seven days, you save $7 million,'' Pino said. ``The plug has gotten rave reviews in the generating field, so I expect business for the next two to three years on this design.''
Meanwhile he's looking beyond that time. Pino said Angie Jones is not only his girlfriend but ``our part-time marketing person.''
And, he added, he is very happy in his new and unusual headquarters. ILLUSTRATION: [Cover]
BUILDING ON RECYCLING
[Color] Staff photo by MARK MITCHELL
Rick Pino bought an abandoned water storage tank from the city and
turned it into his place of business. Employee Thomas Sykes is in
the background.
An abandoned water tank is now home of Mechanical Research and
Design Corp., a custom manufacturing business that makes metal pipe
test plugs.
Staff photos by MARK MITCHELL
Rick Pino bought the building and land from the city through
Portsmouth Redevelopment and Housing Authority for $20,000.
by CNB