Wiegmann Associates has completed work on the St. Charles County Emergency Management’s new $20 million Emergency Operations Center in O’Fallon, Missouri. The new facility consolidates all of the county’s emergency resources under one roof and speeds response time.

The 30,000-square-foot, one-story building houses day-to-day operations of the Department of Emergency Communications, St. Charles County Police Department’s Division of Emergency Management and a 1,400-square-foot data center for county information technology operations and the county-wide emergency radio communications system.

Wiegmann’s scope of work included the design and installation of heating and cooling infrastructure for the facility and the mission-critical data center. Wiegmann built 100 percent redundancy into the HVAC systems and data center to ensure uninterrupted operation under any conditions. Because the facility must operate during natural disasters and terrorist threats, it was built to comply with ICC500, the design and construction standard for storm shelters.

A Building Automation System (BAS) prioritizes cooling for critical areas. If building temperatures rise above a set point due to multiple equipment failures, the BAS system would start to cut off airflow to non-critical areas so critical areas such as the data center remained conditioned.

The HVAC system also provides tight humidity control to protect evidence housed in a 6,200-square-foot addition to the adjacent St. Charles County Police Department. A 6,300-square-foot addition to the adjacent fleet storage building is being used for maintenance and storage of the County’s Emergency’s vehicles and equipment.

This was the first time St. Charles County has engaged in the design/build process.  All other County buildings have been constructed with the design/bid/build process.