Meetings South of Seattle Are “Tradition”

This month’s tour of Weyerhaeuser’s Headquarters Building in Federal Way provides an opportunity for chapter members located south of Seattle to participate in an event closer to home. Meetings south of Seattle were highly attended forty years ago and even became a tradition, eventually culminating in the formation of Puget Sound Chapter’s Rainier Section.

Puget Sound Chapter meeting held at The Poodle Dog restaurant in Fife, November 4, 1968

In November 1968, ASHRAE members from the Tacoma area hosted a chapter dinner meeting at The Poodle Dog restaurant in Fife. Tacoma attorney James V. Ramsdell spoke on the legal liability of engineers. With 97 members and 8 guests attending the meeting, it was decided to make the event an annual tradition. A chapter meeting was held each year at The Poodle Dog from 1968 through 1972. These meetings featured a variety of topics, including a mechanical systems overview of the new (in 1972) 22-story Pacific National Bank Building in Tacoma which was fully air conditioned and featured a heat reclaim system.

“For years there has been a desire for the Tacoma ASHRAE members and non-members associated with the HVAC industry to have a more active participation with ASHRAE.”

--Punch List, October 1987

In October 1987, the monthly Puget Sound Chapter meeting featured a tour of the Tacoma Dome. Prior to the tour, a presentation on the design, negotiation, and construction of the facility was provided by Keith Davidson, mechanical design engineer; Sam Grubb, mechanical contractor; and Ray Laurendeau, owner’s representative. Equipment featured on the tour included the reciprocating water-cooled chillers (200 tons each), two electric boilers (4.1 million Btu/hr each), four centrifugal fans (100,000 CFM / 100 hp each), the ice rink chiller (four compressors at 100 hp each), three water-air heat pumps (42 tons each), and a “state of the art” controls and energy management system.

Puget Sound Chapter members tour the Tacoma Dome on October 14, 1987

Please join the “tradition” on April 23 by attending the tour of Weyerhaeuser’s Headquarters Building in Federal Way, a high-performance building conceived 40 years ago…a time when Puget Sound Chapter members could be found gathered at The Poodle Dog restaurant.