Kjelstad Advanced Industries

Kjelstad Advanced Industries (KAI) is a construction and technology company founded and operated by Peter Kjelstad. Its offices are in Olympia, Washington, but its main research offices are at the Satsop Development Park located just outside of Elma, Washington.

Origins

Peter Kjelstad graduated from MIT in 1990 and had accepted a job as a civilian specialist contractor for a firm working for the United States Navy at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. While living in Washington, he met Lillian Marie. She had always thought he was wasting his talents working for the government, and encouraged him to make the most of his education. To impress the attractive young lady, he drew up a business model and almost instantly found a private grant that turned KAI from an idea on paper into a real research facility.

Original Business Plan

With a background in structural engineering, Peter Kjelstad planned to research innovative new methods to make building materials and methods that would be resistant to tectonic activity and storms. To draw military contracts, he also wanted to market fortification machinery, plans and supplies. With war looming in the Middle East and the possibility for the United States and her allies implanting their military forces in far-flung hotspots all over the world, Kjelstad figured such contracts would provide a good initial surge of capital. This plan did not initially work out as expected; KAI wound up building a lot of sensitive/classified facilities instead.

Early on in the company's development, KAI disappeared almost completely from the public eye. Peter Kjelstad accepted research contracts that carried Top Secret/Compartmentalized Information (TS/CI) restrictions. This vastly curtailed the scope of work his firm was able to pursue. In a 2009 interview with The New Yorker, Kjelstad remarked that "In a roundabout sort of way, I was working for the government again, but my wife wasn't complaining this time. I think that's because the progress we were making was phenomenal. We were coming up with really groundbreaking technologies."

Groundbreaking Technologies

Much of KAI's technology is not available to the public, and the company cannot be privately contracted. One early success Peter Kjelstad achieved was reverse-engineering a compound known as Spraycrete. The origin of the compound was never revealed to him, but he was able to figure out how it worked and how to reproduce it. With that success under his belt, his company also found themselves in possession of two dozen excavator probes, though these were almost always secured, handled and maintained by personnel from another unspecified agency. With these advancements in hand, the next several years were busy for KAI, though details of the firm's work has never been made public.

Recently, Peter Kjelstad went back to his original inspiration, and was able to develop a method for ready fabrication of reinforced structural components for military field structures, disaster relief, equipment storage, etc. The building materials could be fabricated on-site, produced quickly and inexpensively, and required a minimal amount of specialized equipment. The equipment in question used an offshoot of the principles behind Spraycrete. But, because of alterations to the engineering processes involved, the new construction system did not violate KAI's TS/CI restrictions.

The construction system saw limited field use in Afghanistan by civilian security contractors, and briefly in 2011 after the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan. After the Sweeps, KAI has played a major role fortifying key locations around its R & D center in Elma, Washington, and is a major component of the Elma Resistance.