Electricians From Marrs Wire St. Mary?s Hospital

Workers from Marrs Electric Co. have been busy this year running some 2 million feet of wiring through the seven-story St. Mary’s Hospital under construction in Rogers.

Installing the electrical infrastructure for the 200-room, 375,000-SF hospital is a $10.7 million gig. Of the 581 contract projects Marrs has done through its Northwest Arkansas subsidiary, St. Mary’s is the biggest.

The company has 40 of its 75 Northwest Arkansas electricians working on the St. Mary’s site (even though Marrs has another dozen projects under way). It’ll take a total of 100,000 man hours to do the St. Mary’s job, which began in April 2005 and is slated to be completed in September 2007, said Tim White, Marrs’ project manager at St. Mary’s. The hospital is scheduled to open in January 2008.

Marrs Electric of Springdale has wired every hospital in Northwest Arkansas except for Northwest Health’s Bentonville facility. The company specializes in commercial and industrial electric services.

Marrs Electric was founded in Tulsa in 1978 by Gene Marrs. The company has one other office — the Springdale subsidiary, which opened in 1990. Gene Marrs owns 75 percent of the subsidiary. The remainder was sold to employees as part of an employee stock option plan.

Bob Killion, general manager of Marrs’ Northwest Arkansas division, said the Springdale operation averages about $8 million per year in revenue and has about $16 million in projects under contract at any given time. Revenue for the Tulsa office is comparable, he said.

“My job is to make sure the bills are paid and the decks are cleaned so everybody else can do their jobs,” said Killion, who also holds the title of executive vice president for Marrs.

Generators

St. Mary’s is equipped with two 1,500 kilowatt generators that each weigh 40,000 pounds.

“They can run this whole hospital,” White said, noting that a hospital requires much more electricity than a hotel of comparable size because of the electrical drain caused by medical equipment.

When Marrs did the electrical work for the 248-room Embassy Suites hotel in Rogers, for example, the cost was $1.8 million. That’s 17 percent of the cost for electrical contracting at St. Mary’s Hospital, which is comparable in size to the hotel.

The top floor of the physical plant at St. Mary’s has room for another generator if one is needed in the future.

Each generator has a 500-gallon tank of diesel fuel attached to it to provide electricity in case of a power outage. Outside the physical plant, two more tanks hold a total of 5,000 gallons of diesel fuel in reserve.

Killion said the entire hospital site for St. Mary’s is 48 acres. Electrical service had to be brought in from New Hope Road, a half mile away. White said some of the conduit had to be buried as much as nine feet underground, although four feet is the general rule.

Besides electricity for the hospital itself, wiring had to be planted for roadway lighting and the parking lot.

Killion said it’s essential for electrical contractors to work with other contractors so the entire project can be completed on time.

Often, one contractor can’t begin work until another is finished. Killion said Marrs’ representatives have a lengthy meeting with the St. Mary’s architects, Perkins & Will of Atlanta, about every other month.

“It’s to everybody’s advantage to cooperate and get along,” Killion said.

Other Projects

By starting in 1990, Killion said Marrs has grown with Northwest Arkansas.

One of the other projects Marrs currently has under way is MetroPark, the 30-acre tract Haynes Ltd. has under development across Interstate 540 and New Hope Road from the hospital site. Setting up the electrical infrastructure for MetroPark will cost between $700,000 and $800,000, Killion said.

A five-story, $12 million Starwood Aloft hotel is planned for MetroPark, along with a dental clinic, an office building for Nestlé Corp., an automobile dealership and other buildings.

Marrs is also doing $4 million worth of electrical work for a 160,000-SF addition to Washington Regional Medical Center in Fayetteville, which is currently under construction. Marrs did the electrical contracting for WRMC’s 340,000-SF main building in north Fayetteville in 2001 (see chart).

Killion said Marrs doesn’t usually bid on projects.

“Most everything we do is negotiated,” he said. “It may be a year or two before it actually becomes a project.”

Killion said the employees at Marrs Electric set it apart from other companies.

“We are one of the few electrical contractors around here that is 100 percent drug free, no ifs ands or buts,” Killion said. “It’s a win-win deal actually.”