• Posted: September 18, 2018
• better construction, Candor Electric, Christopher Garza, Michael M. Byrne Elementary School

For Christopher Garza, IBEW Local 134 electrician and General Foreman for Candor Electric, working on the expansion at Michael M. Byrne Elementary School on the city’s southwest side is more than just another pipe-and-wire job.

“I went to this school, I had family come to this school,” Garza said. “It’s definitely a sense of accomplishment being able to give back to the community that I grew up in.”

So, when the addition opens with 16 new classrooms in early September, just in time for the kids to go back to school, Garza will know he had a leading hand in making it all come together.

“We took a building out of the ground and turned a grass field into a state-of-the-art elementary school,” Garza said. “It’s a beautiful building and it’s empowering, to say the least.”

“The annex includes two new music rooms, a science lab, a library, and a dining room for the students,” said Matthew Difiore, Superintendent at Candor Electric. “All of it was constructed to be energy efficient.”

For roughly nine months, Candor Electric had about 15 IBEW Local 134 electricians on site distributing emergency power, mechanical, wire-ups and adding in a new building automation system to keep communication between all mechanicals and electrical systems running smoothly.

“Teamwork and skilled electricians is what made this job so successful,” DiFiore said. “Everyone worked together from management, to our site supervision, all the way down to our highly-trained apprentices. Everyone really took a lot of pride in this project.”

“All the classrooms are equipped with four different lighting zones with 0-10 dimming,” Garza explained. “We also installed daylight harvesting centers which dim the lights accordingly to the brightness outside. It’s all ran over Cat 6, and it controls a 120v, 277 lighting system.”

The renovation at Byrne is part of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s push to address overcrowding at over 35 local schools within Chicago.

“Year after year, Byrne students achieve record academic gains, and we owe it to them to remove any barriers to academic success,” Mayor Emanuel said at a groundbreaking ceremony in late 2017. “This annex provides students and teachers with the extra space and facilities necessary to obtain a 21st century education.”

What made this job particularly difficult for Garza and his team was the tight deadline the team was working on. Candor Electric came on board at the beginning of 2018 and had until September to get everything put together since that’s when the kids were coming back to school. Garza said he and his team were able to complete their tasks by working smarter and more efficiently.

“Failure is not an option,” he said. “Failing to plan is planning to fail.”