Steel fabricator joins Palmer industrial mix

PALMER -- The Alaska construction industry has a new player in steel fabrication, and the company chose the Palmer Commercial Park on Outer Springer Loop as its Alaskan home base.

Phoenix, Ariz.-based J.D. Steel Inc. purchased four lots from the city's subdivision, set up a rebar fabrication yard and built a steel frame building that will be split into office and warehouse space. The company specializes in the installation of rebar, wire mesh, post-tension cables and other concrete reinforcement materials.

One noticeable effect of the company's presence will be more frequent rail cars coming onto the Palmer Industrial Spur, a rail line that was installed by the city in the mid-1970s to connect the railroad to the Palmer airport. Each week as many as six rail cars of steel products -- such as 60-foot lengths of rebar -- would be delivered to the public off-loading area near the airport if things go as planned.

"Until we got somebody like J.D. Steel in there, we had mostly companies that dealt in commodities that were pretty easily shipped by truck," City Manager Tom Healy said.

The other most frequent user of the railroad spur is nearby Alaska Pollution Control, a company that receives petroleum waste products -- oil recovered from spills is one -- and re-processes them. But J.D. Steel will likely be bringing in more rail cars than any of the companies currently operating in south Palmer.

"We're glad to see some use on the thing," Healy said. "Obviously, the section all the way to the airport hasn't been used all that much over the years."

So far the fabrication plant has only received shipments by truck from the Port of Anchorage. The first of fabricated rebar shipments (cut and bent to specifications) went to job sites in August and September. J.D. Steel has a union labor subsidiary called Stresscon that hires out of Ironworkers Local 751 in Anchorage, but the Palmer yard is hiring local non-union laborers and training them to run the rebar fabrication yard.

"We've hired basically everybody locally," area Manager Tom Worley said. Worley is a Stresscon employee, and said the union leg of the company will be bidding upcoming jobs in military projects, such the new missile defense system. Next week the company will be fabricating rebar for Kiewit Pacific, the general contractor for the Glenn Highway/Parks Highway interchange project, according to Worley, but that job has so far only ordered piecemeal shipments.

"They haven't awarded the main supply contract yet, so we may still be in the running," Worley said.

According to Alaska Railroad spokesman Patrick Flynn, the spur will be inspected by the Alaska Railroad in preparation for trains. But because it is an industrial spur and not railroad-owned, the city will likely have to pay for maintenance needs of the track.

"In some cases, we'll perform the maintenance and then bill the owners of the track," Flynn said.

The steel is shipped on rail barges from mills in the Lower 48. Although container shipping is more popular for finished goods with a higher value-to-weight ratio, rail barges are still the standard for anything really heavy. The commercial park is less than a mile from the public off-loading lot at the Palmer Airport, a fact that was not lost on the company's management during site selection. There are similar sites in Anchorage -- some with industrial rail spurs leading right into them -- but most are more expensive and hemmed in by other development.

"J.D. Steel looked at Anchorage and said 'No.' J. D. Steel looked at Palmer and a said 'not only do we want one lot, but we want four,'" sales representative Scott Hamilton said. "Certainly if land was available that was already right on the rail line the company would have wanted that. But we're still drastically cutting our costs by being able to bring 186,000-pound loads right into Palmer."

Hamilton grew up on a dairy farm in south Palmer that has fields surrounding the commercial park. His brother John is also working for J.D. Steel as yard foreman.

Scott has been introducing the 32-year-old company to Alaska contractors and John has been applying his experience with heavy equipment to the machinery in the steel fabrication yard. There is a yard crane for moving the bundled steel bars, a shear machine for cutting, and two rebar bending machines. All but the crane were purchased used from several different sites, according to John Hamilton, who said here will be a spiral bender that shapes spooled steel, a thread cutter and a third specialized bender coming next year.

The shear is the largest machine, and the yard is set up so a second shear can be run in parallel to the first one if J.D. Steel captures enough of the market.

"We have to figure out our capacity with the one shear and see how many orders we can get," John said.

Hamilton said increased activity in the commercial park subdivision and along the Palmer rail spur and was an inevitability that many residents didn't see coming. He was one of the people scratching his head when the government purchased 32 acres of hay field and put in streets, street lights and fire hydrants.

"When we drove past it -- or in my case lived right next to it -- we kind of thought it was crazy. But when a major industry comes to the Valley and looks at those things, it's attractive to them," he said.