During its 21st awards celebration last month, the Environmental Business Council of New England (EBC) presented Tighe & Bond with an award for its role in developing the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC). The EBC named this data center, which sits on a former industrial site in Holyoke, the James D.P. Farrell Brownfields Project of the Year. Tighe & Bond was one of several key project contributors to receive this award on behalf of the MGHPCC's success.
Three years in the making and completed in November 2012, the $165 million MGHPCC transformed a historic Holyoke canal mill complex into a gleaming Massachusetts success. It also heralded in a new age of revitalization for this former paper mill city. The purpose of this project was to prepare an abandoned industrial property for redevelopment into an energy-efficient 90,300 s/f data center to support the growing computing needs of five of the most research-intensive universities in the state. This includes the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), University of Mass., Northeastern University, Harvard University, and Boston University; together they are known as the MGHPCC consortium.
The historic collaboration among the consortium, state government, and private industry has been hailed by some as the most significant collaboration among government, industry and public and private universities in the history of the Commonwealth.
Tighe & Bond's contributions to this project, which achieved LEED Platinum certification in 2013, included demolition engineering, permitting and remediation services to clean up the former 8.5 acre Mastex Industries site prior to the MGHPCC's construction. Specifically this encompassed coordination of project funding, hazardous building materials surveys, building demolition design & coordination, creative building debris reuse, environmental permitting activities, assessment and remediation of contaminated soils and groundwater, urban fill soil management, and multi-disciplinary engineering services.