Pallet racking in Sterling, VA.

Yes. Loudoun County Building & Development issues building permits for rack systems, with stamped engineering drawings sealed by a Virginia-licensed design professional above threshold height and load. Virginia enforces the Uniform Statewide Building Code, which is written at the state level but administered by the county, so Loudoun runs its own review and its own submission requirements. Where commodity is stored above 12 feet — 6 feet for high-hazard — a high-piled combustible storage review runs concurrently. We manage the full package from drawings through permit issuance.

Most of the Route 28 and Sully Road flex stock runs 18-to-26-foot clear, and older Sterling Park industrial drops to 16-to-22. That is meaningfully lower than the newer distribution product further west, and it changes the answer: in a 20-foot building the constraint is almost never the rack, it is the sprinkler head and the lowest obstruction in the bay. We spec upright heights against the true obstruction line, not the structural deck, which in shallow flex bays is often a full beam level lower than the drawings suggest.

Yes, and it is most of what we do on this side of the corridor. Data center support storage cannot go dark, so the work gets phased: we sequence teardown and install so the aisles you actually need stay reachable, keep the high-velocity SKUs accessible throughout, and schedule the loud and disruptive work outside your critical windows. We also design to the pick pattern rather than dropping in a standard deep-selective run — in this application, retrieval time is worth more than pallet positions.