BUCKLEY SPACE FORCE BASE, Colo. – The 140th Civil Engineer Squadron celebrated the construction for a new corrosion control facility at a groundbreaking ceremony May 20, 2025, as a number one Military Construction priority for the Colorado Air National Guard.
Retired U.S. Air Force Col. William Smith, senior project manager, National Guard Bureau A4IS (Logistics, Engineering & Force Protection Directorate) said the project has been in the works since 2013 when corrosion in the wing’s fuels facility was recognized as problematic.
The facility will correct various health risk violations and deficiencies, as well as provide fire suppression, a decontamination area, a clean/dirty separation space, a hazardous materials area, paint storage and mixing areas, a non-destructive inspections area, and other corrosion-related features.
“If you had been out here in 2000, probably half a dozen times a year the fire truck would come out and they would be spraying down the Airmen when they walked out of the facility,” Smith said, who has been the base civil engineer for the 240th Civil Engineering Squadron since 2004 and is now a civilian federal employee.
“Everything metal rusts, everything painted gets chipped,” Smith said, describing the need for the facility in broad terms. “All the services must be maintained. There are technical orders and specifications about the type of paint and how you do what, so it requires a level of protection for the Airmen.”
The new corrosion control facility will meet that need by enabling that level of protection by providing the function of a clean/dirty space, allowing for the separation of clean and dirty air.
Laundry facilities are another function meant to keep Airmen safe and healthy. “Imagine taking your uniform home, and it's contaminated with chromate paint,” Smith said. “You don't want to get that in your laundry with your kids' clothes. We have a permit with the sanitary and water district to allow those contaminants to go through the sewer so that they know it's coming so they can treat it.”
Smith explained that the facility being used was designed for the A-7D Corsair, which was replaced with the first of the new F-16s arriving at Buckley in 1991. This restricted the ability of Airmen to do their jobs properly, lacking appropriate airlock and requiring several operational workarounds to be in place. This hampered maintenance in the process as the aircraft must receive paint at a depot-level facility.
“What we wanted to do was to get a facility where we could do the soup-to-nuts mission that the AFSC (Air Force Specialty Code) requires, so the Airmen could be properly trained and the jets could be properly maintained in a space that was adequate and functional and had the safety features that are necessary to allow them to process into a hazardous work area and process out of it with the proper decontamination,” he said.
The requirements to meet new building codes was the result the Air Force Corrosion Control Facility Reference Guide requirements being adopted into the Unified Facilities Criteria dictating that every fighter base’s corrosion control facility be rebuilt.
The project, budgeted at a programmed amount of $12 million, was put through the design process in 2017. Smith attributes the lengthy timeline to the process of detailing what the capabilities of the facility would be.
“Are we going to pitch anything that can't be taken off the airplane and painted in a booth to depot, or are we going to allow them to do the tails and the throats where we have to atomize the paint and it's chromated?” He offered. “Do we need a fully contained paint booth inside of the hangar so that the jet can be painted right there? Versus what we ended up with, which involves taking the parts off the plane and painting them under the booth.”
Aside from the facility increasing mission readiness, Smith described how it also serves as a retention tool by improving working conditions.
“If you love where you work and you're inspired by the space that you have, you're going to tend to want to stay,” he said. “You feel safe. If I come to work and I see that the COANG cares about me enough to invest 15 years of somebody's life and $12 million to build something that is safe, functional and effective, that's going to make me want to stay.”
The facility has an expected completion 18 months from the awarded contract date, with construction likely to begin in July.