Coho Fish Hatchery Building

Yerba Buena’s team designed and constructed a 120 foot x 210-foot pre-engineered steel building for the Coho Salmon-Rearing Facility at the Don Clausen Fish Hatchery. The hatchery is owned by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and operated under contract with the California Department of Fish and Game. Critical facilities had been installed at the hatchery for the rearing of endangered Russian River Coho salmo —including 10 rearing and 12 starter tanks, pumps, water supply and effluent piping, and utilities. But they lacked a shelter for reliable year-round protection against the weather and predators.

The new steel-framed metal building houses the existing fish rearing facilities and will accommodate additional fish tanks and fish egg incubation trays, office space, and roof solar panels.

Yerba Buena provided final design/shop drawings and specifications, based on the government’s preliminary drawings and information. The building is a clear-span type structure, since the existing fish tanks and associated underground piping made it impractical to have interior support columns. Crews installed steel reinforced concrete footings and piers for all support columns and laid a 4-inch- thick steel reinforced concrete slab cast around the existing facilities, with floor drains under the slab. They installed painted sheet metal wall panels along the west, north, and east walls, chain-link screening for open-bay-type walls along the east, south, and west walls, and sheet-metal roof panels with plastic translucent roof panels to provide filtered natural lighting to the fish tanks.

The building has four electrically powered overhead metal roll-up doors, seven exterior steel personnel doors, and two double-swing gates.