Brooke Estes — Intern Site Visit Adventure
On June 30, the Henderson interns had the opportunity to go to a couple of sites which the McGownGordon interns had a hand in. To start of the day, we grabbed lunch at Smoking Guns BBQ in North Kansas City. Despite having been in Kansas City for over a month by then, it was my first experience of KC BBQ. I must say, it did not disappoint. Like most BBQ places do, the plates featured large family style portions. I shared the “Triple Plate” (which was advertised that Guy Fieri ate when he visited) with fellow intern, Jackson Sanor. Other interns also split meals including one group of four who shared a whole family meal! It’s been awesome to see how the interns have gone from quietly sitting in training to being comfortable enough to share food like a family in just a short amount of time.
Our next stop was to the site for the new headquarters building of Mierotto’s, a large jewelry store. Prior to leaving, Ba Stein had let us know how to get to the site from the BBQ place. I was not driving but I was the designated “direction-giver” of our full car. I am terrible with street names so I figured we’d just follow Ba out of the parking lot. Due to poor communication, Ba did not know we were following her so we quickly lost her. After a few phone calls to find out where we were actually supposed to go, we made it to the site but we went through the wrong entrance! Our car and the car following us drove through some pretty slick mud. I had jumped into the car following after some debate whether to proceed moving as getting stuck was a high possibility. And of course, that’s what happened to the car behind us. Good thing I already had my boots on because pushing the car was our only option. We eventually made it to the site 30 minutes late and I learned that good communication and writing down directions is the best way to go!
Mierotto’s was an interesting site to visit. It was a large, high-end jewelry store owned by a well-known Italian family. The security features for this building went above and beyond, and each one had a specific reason to prevent theft. First, they said that the concrete foundation could withstand 9,000 PSI, which is three times the strength of a regular concrete slab. The reason for using such strong concrete is so that way no one could dig a hole and break through the foundation. The design also called for burglar rails in some of the air ducts despite only being 18 inches in height. They said that even though it’s a small space, there have been cases where people have used smaller children to crawl through the air ducts to get inside and then simply open a door for the adults to get in. The building also featured large windows that displayed the entire downstairs show room floor. The McGownGordon representative said that the windows were all “bullet resistant” as “bulletproof” is an impossibility. But she assured us that it would take some pretty heavy duty machinery to break through that glass.
Fortunately, the second site that we visited that day was much easier to find so we did not get lost on the way there. We also got to tour the Missouri Innovation Campus which will be used for University of Central Missouri students and high school students in Lee’s Summit. The building focused on STEM fields and is broken down into sections which were all designated to a certain color. These sections include engineering, health sciences, computer science, and nursing.
All in all, the whole day was a great experience. It’s very cool to see plans on paper and on the computer come alive into a working space!
