Hey good morning. Thanks for coming out today.
The bones of the structure, the structural steel that you see
will soon be the health sciences building.
When wood was the material, of choice, or the material available,
and the last rafter was put in place
people would pause and have the raising ceremony.
Usually they celebrated it by fixing an evergreen tree which you see on the beam.
Thank you Chris, thank you all for coming today
to celebrate this milestone
in the construction of the Health Sciences Building.
I want to begin by thanking everyone who helped make this happen.
In this 60,000 square foot building
we will have Nursing and WAMMI and some other health programs
a state-of-the-art visual virtual lab
and the beginning of what I believe will be a very important piece
of how the University of Alaska serves Alaskans
training our health care workers and making certain that Alaskans
have the kind of health care
the kind of quality health care that our home grown Alaskans can deliver.
So I think in closing I would just say one more time
to all of you who have in one way or another helped contribute
to the planning, to the funding, to the construction,
thank you for your work and we look forward to continuing
to develop these programs at UAA and throughout the state of Alaska
because as you know, we offer many of our programs statewide
and that is an important responsibility that we have to people of this state.
So now let me introduce John Eng
who will make a few comments about the construction project
and thanks very much John for the way in which you and your team
are working with our team to make sure this goes well
Thank you all for coming out. I want to thank the sponsors in addition to Carlisle,
Alcan Electric, Livingston Soan, Last Frontier Mechanical and of course UAA.
One of the things I would like to comment on - the Chancellor made a comment
to thank the workers, the craft people who work on this thing every day
a friend of mine working as a project engineer tried an experiment
with the name of every construction worker and everybody involved in the project
on the bulletin board outside the project
And we've now done that too on our bulletin board
I'm proposing a toast, to the successful completion of the building
and to the generation of students staff and faculty
here at UAA who will enjoy this building in the future.
[Sound of chatter and machinery]
[Cheering]
