Sukut Construction, Inc. Has Broken Ground On $7.5 Million Riverside County High School Project

RIVERSIDE, CA June 19, 2008 - Sukut Construction, Inc. has broken ground on a $7.5 million project to develop the site for a new Inland Empire high school, adding to the company's impressive portfolio of complex and competitively bid school and university projects.

The campus for the future Hillcrest High School, located near State Route 91 in Riverside, is recognized by veteran school construction managers as the most challenging school building site tackled in Southern California in decades. The job includes construction of a 3,000-foot-long, 20-foot high retaining wall to be carved out of an adjacent mountain.

Joe Philbin, president of Sukut's Inland Empire division, said Sukut bid the project because of the company's expertise in managing difficult steep and rocky landscapes. "This is not the typical school site grading contract," Philbin said. "It is a very challenging site." Work began in late April and is expected to be complete in early 2010, Philbin said. The new public high school on a 50-acre site will help accommodate new growth in the Inland Empire.

In all, Sukut will excavate and remove 350,000 cubic yards of dirt, and create a 65,000-square-foot soil nail wall. The wall system will be supported by 100-foot-long soil anchors drilled horizontally into the sheered mountainside, then covered by layers of concrete including a final layer sculpted into a boulder-scape façade. Sukut also will perform mass grading for the entire campus, including school building pads, the football field and storm drains.

The Hillcrest contract comes on the heels of several other school projects, reflecting Sukut's fast growing market share of Southern California's public and private school campus development. Other recent school projects by Sukut include:

• The massive $22 million grading contract for the recently-occupied San Juan Hills High School. Sukut worked for a private residential developer who was required to include a new public school site in his plans for the Capistrano Unified School District in Orange County. Philbin said the job entailed excavating 100 feet into a hillside, and raising the canyon floor with 13 million cubic yards of dirt taken from the housing portion of the development. The canyon floor was supported with geo-grid reinforcement.
• The $25 million turnkey construction of the Drescher Graduate Campus for Pepperdine University, which included several geologic challenges. The site was a steep and unstable hillside, and required remedial work on an old landslide mass. The job called for Sukut to dig deep holes into the ground to re-compact the earth.
• The $700,000 grading of Fontana High School No. 5, completed at the end of May, for the Fontana Unified School District. The four-month job involved importing dirt to grade a 60-acre site.