A $75 million cold storage facility that will share space on both the Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles properties broke ground yesterday, marking what will become the largest near-port facility of its kind in Southern California.
Sitting on a 12.6 acre piece of property purchased by Baker Cold Storage in 2012, the Lineage Logistics-operated facility will offer 250,000 sq. ft. of space that will accommodate a cross-dock for trucks, shipping containers, and rail service. Controlled Environments Construction (CEC) will act as the contract developer as well as the designer/builder for the project.
The development comes after two major cold storage leaks last year, one of which leaked some 150 gallons of toxic industrial ammonia that almost reached the LA River. Ammonia is still the most popular chemical used for refrigeration, though this new facility will be operated using an ultra-low ammonia system developed by Los Angeles-based company NXTCold, which claims that their new system uses a 98% less ammonia charge than other systems.
According to Baker, their current site and facility will be “environmentally-friendly” after the property was mitigated after being contaminated by its previous owner. J.H. Baxter had used the properly previously for wood treatment chemicals, leading to what Baker described as a site which was costly to remediate.
“Baker’s mitigation plan provides for an ‘engineered cap’ that includes soil and groundwater monitoring, 50,000 yards of imported fill, and vapor retarders beneath the entire site. With these measures in place, the site can soon be used to its full potential, providing necessary cold storage for shippers and jobs for the surrounding areas,” said Gary Guesman, President of CEC, in a statement.
The storage unit will house some 54M pounds of food with its cross-dock able to handle transloading of 2M pounds of product daily. It will also provide nearly 100 new jobs to the region.
The project is expected to be completed in the spring of 2015.
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