To aid with flood relief in Eastern Kentucky, our team members took a truckload of cleaning supplies, food and other necessities to Appalachian Regional Healthcare (ARH) where the items could be dispersed to the affected areas. If you would like to donate to flood relief, you can contribute to the Denham-Blythe GoFundMe page at https://www.gofundme.com/f/denhamblythe-KYFlood or the ARH donation site at https://www.arh.org/floods

We recently installed a 220-ton process vessel at our PureCycle Technologies site in Ohio. Check out the remarkable journey over water and land of this towering piece of equipment to its final destination!

Lexington students were invited to attend our design and construction industry STEM career day. Presentations were given on mechanical, electrical, structural, and civil engineering, as well as architecture and design/build. Students interacted with Denham-Blythe professionals and learned how the construction industry works. We hope the interaction will foster and encourage future STEM career goals.

Denham-Blythe has been selected to design and build a new 30,000 square foot facility for developer Haymaker Commercial Real Estate, slated for completion in December 2022. Located in the Coldstream Research Park in Lexington, KY, the building will be leased by Kinetic by Windstream for its new regional headquarters. The headquarters will support operations in 18 states and provide software and network solutions.

Denham-Blythe is excited to be constructing the new consolidated Universal Piping Industries manufacturing plant in the Lanes Run Business Park in Georgetown, KY. The plant will be a 108,000 SF facility that will allow UPI to prefabricate customized piping and equipment to be installed at manufacturing facilities throughout the United States. Construction is slated to be completed by April 2023.

At Denham-Blythe, we want to highlight safety in every aspect of our projects. To celebrate Construction Safety Week 2022, our employees were asked what they believe helps build a strong safety culture to ensure everyone’s well-being on the jobsite. Listen to what our employees have to say regarding what safety means to them.

On November 3, 2021, Denham-Blythe was presented with two Build Kentucky awards at AGC’s 12th Annual Safety, Issues and Education Conference in Louisville, KY. The first award was presented in the Design Build category for Denham-Blythe’s work on Bluegrass Care Navigator’s new corporate headquarters in Lexington, Ky. The second award was given in the Building Renovation category for Denham-Blythe’s design and renovation for a distillery located in Frankfort, KY. To read more about the projects, click on the “Learn More” buttons below. Bluegrass Care Navigators New Lexington Headquarters Bluegrass Care Navigators acquired a pre-existing facility to better meet their administrative needs. Denham-Blythe was contracted for design/build services to renovate the interior and construct a new two-story atrium. Design highlights include an open ceiling with acoustical cloud accents and “floating” light rings, glass partition walls and railing systems for the main stairwell and second floor balcony. Historical Distillery located in Frankfort, KY Denham-Blythe oversaw the demolition and renovation of a two-story reutilization from distillery bottling shipping/receiving area into visitor’s center. Maintaining the structural integrity of the 1881 historical building and was vital. The projects includes the construction of a new outdoor patio space, renovation and creation of six new tasting rooms, and the expansion of the fermentation hall to accommodate twelve fermenter tanks.

Denham-Blythe Company Partners with Japan-based Maeda Corporation, Achieving Mutual Benefits (Lexington, Kentucky) Denham-Blythe Company has signed a formal partnership with Japanese-based, Maeda Corporation. Maeda Corporation is a $6.5 billion/year construction management company that has served clients in the US and North America since 1985, and Japanese clients since 1919. The partnership will procure mutually beneficial business advantages across both market sectors as it moves forward. Through the agreement, Denham-Blythe Company aims to develop and strengthen connections as Japanese companies shift to the US market, while Maeda Corporation sets to gain support from Denham-Blythe Company in strengthening their market share in the US. “After working together on various projects as subcontractor and/or a Joint Venture partner, we are thrilled to add the ability of service for or clients the partnership provides.” – Rene DeBerdt, Construction and Development Manager of Denham-Blythe Company.

Culture Denham-Blythe incorporates safety into every aspect of its business model, from concept to completion. Safety is a core value within company that is led by executive example, bleeding into every fiber of company culture. We believe that every person assigned to a project has equal rights to a hazard-free workplace with the ability to stop unsafe acts. Understandably, it can be challenging to establish a true company culture. Over the past ten years, Denham-Blythe has worked incessantly toward achieving our current status. Presently, Denham-Blythe has over 1.5 million manhours without a lost time injury and has not had a recordable incident in 14 months. We have learned that by maintaining focus on leading indicators and continual improvement, the lagging indicators—such as metrics, will follow in positive trends. Every individual on our team has a professional obligation to earnestly pursue the values of our company with safety being one. One of the biggest challenges we had to overcome was the redefining the perception of safety being a competing entity for efficiency and quality. Once we understood how to ensure that safety, efficiency, and quality complement each other, it changed our team’s outlook and had a very positive effect on company culture. At Denham-Blythe, value steers the direction of the company and safety is invaluable to us. Operations Our EHS team is comprised of seven safety professionals, all with extensive knowledge in the safety field. To help effectively manage our safety program at a project level, Denham-Blythe safety professionals are responsible for completing frequent job site inspections, taking part in the job hazard analysis process, investigating and managing incidents, among a myriad of other responsibilities. At the corporate level, safety professionals are responsible for overseeing the company’s safety program in addition to working closely with project managers and subcontractors to prepare site-specific documentation. Safety has a presence in every facet of operational business at Denham-Blythe. Continual Improvement A continual improvement plan forces companies to ask the tough questions: “Where we are effective? Where are we failing? and How can we be better?” Our passion for continued improvement has pushed us to explore ways to evaluate our safety management system at a company level using a safety committee in conjunction with a continuous improvement model (developed by the National Safety Council). Our safety committee consists of a cross-section of company team members, executives, safety professionals, and field staff who meet monthly to evaluate improvement. The continual improvement model by the NSC guides the meetings in a way that by the end of the year, we will have evaluated every aspect of our safety management system. We value our safety committee having two-way communication utilizing the different perspectives represented based on their individual roles and responsibilities. The safety committee is a very important piece to continual improvement in our company. AGC and Denham-Blythe AGC has been a vital resource for Denham-Blythe, providing essential guidance for some of the difficult safety challenges in the construction industry, while also serving as a valuable networking resource for like-minded companies who face similar challenges. AGC has helped us raise the standards of Denham-Blythe’s safety program through our partnership with the AGC PROTECT program. The PROTECT program has provided Denham-Blythe with several training opportunities in addition to an unbiased viewpoint on our local projects through PROTECT site inspections. Additionally, being an AGC member has given us the ability to participate in the planning and execution of the annual AGC Safety, Issues, and Education conference. The annual AGC of Kentucky conference is a great event that provides a day of extensive networking and education for employers across the state of Kentucky. The Award Process Participants complete an application form and submit it to AGC of America or through their local AGC Chapter. Members of the national AGC Safety & Health Committee review and judge the submissions at the annual Construction Safety & Health Conference. The finalists in each divisional category then compete at the AGC National Convention for either a 1st, 2nd or 3rd place award. Finalists must then give an oral presentation in front of a panel of five highly qualified judges who determine the first place winners.

Denham-Blythe Company led the Engineering, Procurement, and Construction (EPC) team for the PureCycle Technologies Feedstock Evaluation Unit (FEU), a groundbreaking plastics recycling facility located in Ironton, Ohio. PureCycle Technologies just announced it has successfully completed purified waste carpet from its FEU, transforming discarded carpet into clear, odorless, Ultra-Pure Recycled Polypropylene (UPRP) resin through its proprietary plastics recycling technology, developed and invented by Procter & Gamble. “Working with a startup company attempting to bring novel recycling technology to market would be an intimidating project for most people,” said Michael Patterson, Executive Vice President of Denham-Blythe Company and FEU Project Executive. “However, our team, including EN Engineering, embraced our role from day one. We’re proud to be partners with PureCycle Technologies and to see the successful operation of the FEU, which marks a huge milestone for the future of plastics recycling.” By bringing this game-changing technology to market, PureCycle Technologies has gained global attention, partnering with industry giants including Nestlé, L’Oréal, Aptar and Milliken & Company. With the successful scaling of this technology, PureCycle has plans for a second phase which is expected to come online in the summer of 2021. “By working together with a focused approach, we can clean up the planet,” stated PureCycle Chief Operations Officer Tayt Rule. “We’ve had a great experience working with the Denham-Blythe and EN Engineering team for our Feedstock Evaluation Unit.  Because of our track record of success together, we are even more excited to be working with this team for construction on our commercial plant.” Within the next 30-60 days, the teams will begin work on a larger-scale, commercial-sized polypropylene resin purification facility on the same site, which will process 105,000,000 lbs. per year of recycled polypropylene. About Denham-Blythe Company Denham-Blythe Company is a design-build construction company with over 40 years of experience in the automotive, industrial, food/pharma, healthcare, institutional, and commercial sectors. Since 1976, Denham-Blythe has completed more than 10,000 projects across the U.S. and in Mexico for a diverse customer base that includes local startups and Fortune 500 companies.

By Karen Hawthorne Source: Construction in Focus Not many companies can take on a construction project from start to finish. Denham-Blythe has been doing just that for more than 40 years across a wide range of industries. The secret? An excellent team of designers and builders under one roof. Take a walk through the streets in any American city and you will see impressive buildings – from office towers to hospitals to factories. What you don’t see is the all the vision, time, planning and work that goes into the construction of these buildings. Raising these structures takes hundreds of people. You’ve got architects, engineers, contractors, equipment operators and more, so often the biggest challenge becomes managing the people and their competing voices to keep the timelines moving and on budget. That is the hard work that takes place even before one shovel goes in the ground. Then, when construction does start, different factors such as safety, logistics and other unexpected issues must be managed. Few companies are able to take their clients through all these steps of a construction project without having to subcontract work out. Denham-Blythe is one company that can. With its 40 years of design and build history, this company knows how to get it all done. The “Design-Build” delivery method is really about covering all the steps in a construction project from the point of sketching out what a building may look like to designing it, and ultimately building it from the ground up. Denham-Blythe got its start from two engineers out of the University of Kentucky in Lexington, where the company is headquartered, who saw the value of having all people working on a project sit down at the same table to prevent obstacles before they crop up. Now, Denham-Blythe has two additional offices in Nashville, Tennessee and Greenville, South Carolina, boasts 200 employees, and has handled more than 10,000 projects for clients across diverse industries, including manufacturing, automotive, food, pharma and healthcare. It also takes on different sizes of projects from small startups to Fortune 500 companies. “We do work on buildings associated with everything from bananas to Post-It Notes,” says Michael Patterson, Executive Vice President of Construction and Business Development for Denham-Blythe. “Our relationships are so well established because the customer has one person to talk to. It’s a single point of communication and responsibility,” Patterson says. “Having all the forces in house is actually very uncommon. You will see people and companies that offer ‘design-build’ but realistically, there are very few in the industry that have all of those design disciplines and construction capabilities employed full-time in their company.” The company takes pride in being able to tackle the more complicated projects because of its diverse and specialized staff. About 85 percent of all the work the company does is turnkey with Denham-Blythe handling the entire end-to-end design and construction. “We have a saying here that if it’s a difficult, challenging project then that’s a perfect Denham-Blythe job,” Patterson says. “We have the whole package for design and build elements, including architects, civil and structural engineers, mechanical, electrical – all of those disciplines along with the construction forces as well. So we enjoy those projects and it sets us apart from the competition.” And some of the projects can be incredibly complex. For example, one of Denham-Blythe’s clients required a major processing line renovation in its factory. “That’s not anything abnormal for us in general; but we ended up working in the middle of a functioning facility. So we had to rebuild the line while not interrupting production on either side of it.” Oh and by the way, the factory was producing specialized glass, the kind that you see on an iPhone, so the margin of error during all this work was zero. So, with two glass production lines working on either side, the Denham-Blythe team carved out the middle of the plant and made the new part of the building deeper by taking it down 20 feet into the rock to create the height needed for the production line. “Just logistically putting that in the bullseye or center of a functioning glass manufacturing facility was very interesting, very challenging. It involved some very major cranes and a lot of planning,” says Patterson. To accomplish all this, the company had six teams work continuously, seven days a week for about six months. “It was very high-risk work but we didn’t have an accident either, so we are very proud of our safety record on that one.” Other significant projects the company is currently working on include a 29,000-square-foot, three-floor expansion of cable manufacturer Okonite Company’s logistics building in Orangeburg, South Carolina. This involved expanding the dock area of the facility as well as creating 75,000 square feet of paved parking for trucks. Denham-Blythe was also chosen to design and build a 270,000-square-foot plant for DAE-IL Corporation, a powertrain and parts manufacturer for the automotive industry. What is even more impressive is that during the work on all of these large-scale and complex projects, Denham-Blythe has more than 1 million safe man hours of work – that is the equivalent of about 35 months of work. The company has been recognized with Governor’s awards in both Kentucky and Tennessee for its work excellence as well as its safety record. “Safety for us is a value and a cultural element,” Patterson says. “The numbers are more than just numbers; it’s really what we value and we take it very seriously. We start each meeting with a safety topic, and all of our projects have a job hazard analysis.” These high safety standards qualify the company to bid on projects for larger, more robust companies. It’s these larger companies that actually pre-screen potential contractors to ensure that they have a solid safety track record. Along with all the success Denham-Blythe has achieved, the challenge to continue to recruit and hire the best talent is firmly on the radar. “We are seeing a turning of the tide now to more interest in vocational programs and construction trades, because people are realizing you can make a good wage.” To scout out future talent, Denham-Blythe has established a co-op program where high school students have the chance to get a real-world view of how things work at the company. But there’s more to what the company does than steel and concrete. Certain jobs stand out for their impact on the lives of people and the environment, which is an important legacy for the company. For example, “We will be working to build a game-changing plastics recycling facility,” shares Patterson. “It will be brand new in the industry and we are very proud to be part of that opportunity. It should be under construction in the last quarter of the year. We also work in healthcare building so we know that we are doing work that helps people directly.”