Despite COVID, Nauset Completes Critical Building Upgrades

by Ben Goldfarb

When the pandemic first hit last year, life as we knew it was brought to a near standstill, as much of the population took necessary precautions to avoid contracting and spreading the virus. In our industry, outdoor projects were able to resume relatively quickly but work on interior projects, particularly those within occupied residential communities, presented far more complex challenges.

One such project was a pair of condominium buildings within Cabot Estate Condominiums, one of Boston’s premier luxury gated communities. Originally built in the 1980s, the aging HVAC system was overdue for modernization. The condo association selected an energy-efficient, state-of-the-art Daikin HVAC system, complete with an app that allows residents to access heating and cooling controls within their units via a tablet or smartphone.

Outside work included the removal of existing heat pumps and the installation of new systems, but the interior work presented the real coordination challenge. Working in occupied environments always requires additional safety protocols and practices that minimize disruption to building occupants and commercial activity, but those protocols increased in importance as the pandemic began taking its toll.

The interior work required access to each of the 48 condominiums in order to replace the control panels located in the utility closets of each unit. Since the installation of the new compressors and HVAC units required the old system to be completely shut down, a temporary cooling tower was utilized to provide conditioned air in each unit while the existing system was taken down and new compressors and HVAC units were brought on-line. Each compressor services 4-5 units and had to remain shut down until each individual unit was tied in, tested, and fired up.

Further compounding the COVID-19 safety challenges was the relative age of the condominium owners which skews to an older, and therefore more vulnerable, demographic. This extra sensitive working environment made Nauset’s strict adherence to COVID-19 safety measures mission-critical and key to the projects’ overall success.

In addition to a third-party safety consultant, Nauset employed a dedicated full-time COVID-19 site safety officer whose sole responsibility was to monitor the project site for safety compliance including sanitizing work areas, enforcing the donning of masks and other PPE, and social distancing. Access to the individual units was coordinated and prescheduled on a per unit basis through the owner’s property manager, Dannin Management Corporation, making communication and agility key team attributes to successfully achieve the compressed project schedule.

While working within residential units or common areas, workers installed ZipWall plastic barriers typically used as dust barriers for interior construction to partition work areas off from occupied spaces. The ZipWalls also doubled as a preventative barrier to reduce the possible transmission of COVID-19. During the project there were no reported cases of COVID-19 among Nauset employees or its subcontracting partners.

Working in occupied settings, particularly during a pandemic, presents a unique set of construction challenges. However, maintaining a heightened awareness and implementation of proper safety protocols can go a long way to help ensure a safe environment.

Ben Goldfarb is the vice president overseeing Nauset Construction’s business development, marketing and administrative operations.