UPS breaks ground on Louisville hub expansion
UPS hosted a groundbreaking event today (25 August) at the site of its Centennial hub in Louisville. The $300m expansion project will triple the size of the package facility to 838,000 square feet, and nearly double current sorting capacity to 85,000 packages per hour.
The Centennial hub, constructed in 2007 during UPS’s 100th anniversary year, provides pickup and delivery operations for customers in Louisville and surrounding counties and serves as a transfer point for trailers moving to destinations beyond Kentucky. With its proximity to UPS Worldport air hub at Louisville International Airport, it also supports end-of-runway express service by allowing packages to be inserted into the Worldport air operations as late as 1:30 a.m.
The expansion will take place in three phases and continue through 2020. In addition to increasing the building’s footprint, the project will modernize the hub’s conveyor technology.
Six-sided decode tunnels will replace traditional scanning to capture package information from address labels. Label applicators will place “smart labels” on packages for local delivery, providing UPS loaders faster instruction of a package’s proper staging location in a UPS vehicle prior to transport.
