Floor 16- Nice day for Iowa in December 😉 #buildingamerica
Discussion
Darn can’t zap you right now. Will try again. Cool job. That’s real work. I’d be interested to hear your take on how structures like that are meant to handle certain temperature and asymmetrical damage scenarios. I’ve never done commercial project supervision before. Just residential and some multi dwelling. But I’m really interested in high rises. When I worked for the cable co I used to use the lockbox key to get on as many roofs as I could. Took a few dates to such places for a little excitement lol. Almost got busted a few times. A couple skydive buddies jumped off a few cranes downtown Vancouver. I did Lions Gate once. Steel and concrete are amazing.
This is the first one I’ve been a part of. We are typically a general contractor that does its own concrete. On this project we were subcontracted through another subcontractor to place and finish the post tension decks. The first pours we started at 4am pouring the deck and by 2 in the afternoon the slab was finishing and they would be setting column forms and pouring them the same day. Along with the center core walls 10 hours after the floor was in. Blew my mind but we it’s worked up to the 16th floor. The process is all slowed considerably with the cold temperatures.
It’s an awesome skill coordinating such a thing. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from house building, foundations and slab pours wait for no one. And the consequences of having a blowout are expensive. Or not maintaining temperatures and having concrete freeze. We would be doing foundations here in -35 to not lose days on the schedule and double insulated tarps and hydraulic heat line heaters were the only thing that made it possible. I’ve had a few slab pours where we had to run frost fighters for up to 3 weeks to get the frost driven down far enough to get plumbing groundworks and in slab insulation and heat lines run before the pour. And all it takes at -35 is for your heaters to go down for a night and it sets you back a week’s worth of thawing. I can only imagine how nice it is to build in more southern climates. But every place has its challenges. Construction workers and supers do such important work.
In Iowa , winter conditions double the cost to pour…