Officials at Camp Humphreys in South Korea hold a groundbreaking ceremony Wednesday on a project that will build a six-story apartment building for unaccompanied officers and a separate four-level parking garage. Both structures are set for completion by May 2007. (F. Neil Neeley / Courtesy of U.S. Army)
PYEONGTAEK, South Korea — Work crews are busy at Camp Humphreys putting up a new apartment building for officers, and next spring they’ll get started on a four-level parking garage, too.
Officials formally kicked off the $20 million project with a ground-breaking ceremony at the apartment site on Wednesday. Both structures, on the south-central part of the camp, are set for completion in May 2007, said Brandi Dennis-Peña, project engineer with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Pyeongtaek Resident Office at Camp Humphreys.
The six-story apartment structure will house 96 officers. It’s called a UOQ, or unaccompanied officer quarters, and will cost $16.4 million.
Workers already have demolished four old one-story administrative buildings to clear room for the apartment structure, which will stand just across a road from the new parking structure, Dennis-Peña said.
Each apartment will have a separate living and sleeping area, a kitchenette and bathroom.
“It’s set up like a suite,” Dennis-Peña said. “So if they walk into their room, they’ll walk into the living area and then there’ll be a separate door that’ll lead them into the sleeping area.”
Each apartment will also have a laundry closet that will accommodate a vertically stacked washer and dryer.
“Kitchenette and laundry, that’s what every person wants,” Dennis-Peña said.
The building will have two passenger elevators and a freight elevator.
On the first floor will be a mud room, “which is essentially where the officers can come and wipe off their boots so they don’t have to track through the hallways,” Dennis-Peña said.
A multipurpose room is planned for the second floor, she said.
And the building will have a central storage area with storage lockers for each resident.
Next spring workers will begin building a three-story, 248-space, $3.7 million parking garage. It’s use won’t be limited to UOQ residents, Dennis-Peña said.
“Parking is very, very limited on this installation,” Dennis-Peña said. “And with … new people coming in, we need those new parking areas, so that will definitely help.”
Workers will make room for the garage by knocking down two one-story office buildings that are currently in use, Buildings S-727 and S-728.
“The current users of those buildings will be relocated … and then we will start the work on the parking structure,” Dennis-Peña said.
The Seong Bo Construction Industrial Co. Ltd. of Seoul is carrying out the work under contract with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
The U.S. military plans to transform Camp Humphreys into its main installation in South Korea in coming years, spending $5 billion in construction alone. The post will triple in size from 1,230 acres to 3,558, and its population will grow from more than 11,000 to 45,000, a figure that includes troops, civilian workers and family members.
