The Daytona Beach Tanger Outlets mall opened on schedule a week before Black Friday, a feat some locals thought might not be possible when the first walls were raised 11 months earlier.
George Thomas was not one of those skeptics.
As a senior project superintendent for Choate Construction, the project’s general contractor, Thomas was tasked with figuring out how to meet that deadline.
He went into it fairly confident, having helped successfully complete an outlet mall in North Carolina in July 2014 that Tanger was also involved in.
Thomas was a senior project superintendent with that project as well.
In the case of the Daytona Beach Tanger Outlets, the project came with a couple of extra challenges: 1. The need to import more than 300,000 yards of fill dirt to raise the floor level 5 feet; and 2. the advent in early October of Hurricane Matthew, which resulted in six lost construction days.
Thomas said his company solved the first challenge by hauling infill dirt at a rate of 70 to 80 truckloads a day over four months from a wooded inland area in Palm Coast, courtesy Jon Hall Grading of Orlando.
As far as the delay caused by Matthew, Thomas said construction crews ramped up their hours in the final month to 12 to 14 hours a day seven days a week.
Fortunately, the project during that home stretch got an assist from Mother Nature.
“We didn’t have any rain (delays) after the hurricane, which was pretty miraculous,” he said.
Even though the outlet mall is now open, Thomas said Charlotte-based Choate Construction isn’t quite done here yet.
He said his company is still on call to fix things Tanger officials may find “that aren’t quite working right — typical punch list items for a project that size,” he said.
