BY GARRETT ANDREWS | PHOTOS BY JASON E. KAPLAN Behind the ticket counters at Portland International Airport is a basic white wall, a construction feature likely ignored by most of the daily crush of global travelers. But behind that wall is something quite impressive. At any given time of the day, upward of a thousand workers are closing out a critical phase of the Terminal Core Expansion (TCORE) project, the main component of the larger, $2.8 billion PDX Next airport capital initiative. Flooring, wall treatments, ticket kiosks, security checkpoints and bathrooms are going in. Food and retail vendors — 22 Oregon favorites, among them Blue Star Donuts, Grassa and Pilot House Distilling —are readying their spaces. Employees of all stripes — airline, concession, security — are being trained. After a three-month delay announced earlier this year, the project, which began in 2019, is chugging toward a New terminal construction at PDX major checkpoint. It wasn’t easy to get here, project leaders attest, with sky-high sustainability and diversity goals, a supply-chain-altering global pandemic that disrupted multiple supply chains, a protracted labor shortage and a war in Ukraine that drove up raw material prices. Compounding the complexity is the fact that this has been a remodel of an existing, fully operational international airport, not new construction. “Something like this had not been 34
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