
PeaceHealth has been engaging in a fair amount of construction north of its hospital — PeaceHealth St. Joseph Medical Center — in Bellingham. For starters, a new PeaceHealth women’s health clinic has been announced along the new Birchwood Avenue near where it passes under Interstate 5 in Bellingham, just south of the Bellingham Cold Storage facilities on Orchard Drive.
In addition, Custom Concrete Contracting has just completed a large related project in the same vicinity, having poured a huge pervious concrete parking lot as overflow parking for the hospital.
Here’s a look at what CCC’s expert flatwork crews installed for PeaceHealth, working under Dawson Construction on this Whatcom County concrete project.
Traditional concrete
First, we formed and poured 2,750 linear feet of curbing to help define the parking areas and provide space for streetlights and landscaping.
To ensure traffic flow between Birchwood Avenue and the lot, Custom Concrete poured 950 square feet of broom-finished entrance and exit ramps, one at each end of the pervious concrete parking lot. A long concrete sidewalk borders the north side of the lot, along Birchwood, and various other ramps, sidewalks and bicycle parking pads round out the project.
Pervious concrete

While the traditional concrete was being completed, our expert pervious crews poured about 80,000 square feet of pervious concrete paving for the large pervious parking lot.
The construction site sits just north of Bug Lake and Squalicum Creek in an area that has long been a mix of wooded and open greenspace. Pervious concrete helps mitigate stormwater issues by allowing rainwater to seep straight through the surface into the ground beneath, much as it did before the construction. This is one reason the city of Bellingham is a proponent of pervious concrete on projects like this one.
Custom Concrete has been pouring and finishing pervious/porous concrete in cities throughout Northwest Washington since 2009. We’ve worked on public works, commercial and private jobs in King, Snohomish, Skagit and Whatcom counties.
Custom Concrete’s portion of this Bellingham project began in July 2022 and wrapped up just before the end of the year.
Our flatwork crews here at Custom Concrete in Bellingham are experts in many forms of concrete work. For your next commercial project, please consider giving CCC a call.
