CO Award Winners

Concrete Cutters Celebrated at Las Vegas Awards Ceremony

The 4th Annual Concrete Openings Awards ceremony was held during January’s World of Concrete international trade show and exhibition at the Las Vegas Convention Center. The awards recognize some of the most innovative and challenging projects completed by CSDA contractors in 2016.

A crowd of show attendees and members of the industry media gathered around the association’s exhibit booth as CSDA Executive Director Patrick O’Brien led the proceedings. First held at World of Concrete 2013, the ceremony showcases best projects covered in CSDA’s official magazine as chosen by a panel of judges, and acknowledges the concrete cutting, polishing, GPR imaging or selective demolition contractors who performed the work.

Job stories featured in the magazine’s four quarterly issues from 2016 were split into four categories and put before the panel. Judges scored each job based on:

• Pre-planning
• Use of innovation
• Degree of difficulty
• Quality requirements

The project with the highest score in each category was declared the winner. Display boards of the winning projects were featured at the CSDA exhibit booth during the four-day World of Concrete exhibition, and a special commemorative book was produced for the winners and those in attendance. During the ceremony, O’Brien thanked all the contractors who submitted their projects for publication and congratulated the winning companies.

These winning projects are just some of the complex, painstaking jobs being done by CSDA contractors everyday on jobsites around the U.S. and beyond. The association encourages all concrete cutting, breaking, polishing and imaging members to submit their best job stories for publication in Concrete Openings, and to consider entry to this year’s awards. Look out for more information about the Concrete Openings 2017 Awards later in the year.

To read any, or all, of these job stories in full, search this site using the box in the bottom-left corner. For more information about the winning projects, the awards or about CSDA, call 727-577-5004 or email rhitchen@concreteopenings.com.

And the winners are….

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Company: Holes Incorporated
Location: Houston, Texas
Category: Building Construction
Issue Published: June 2016

The contractor was tasked with making eight 11­-foot-­tall by 8­-foot-­wide window openings as part of a major building renovation for Houston’s largest daily newspaper. A series of new conference rooms had been planned for a section of the four-story building, so the inclusion of two openings per floor provided the conference rooms with natural light and a view of the city’s skyline.

Using wall sawing and core drilling techniques with diamond tools, the contractor created a series of 8-foot-wide, 10-inch-tall relief sections before cutting the main 8-foot-wide, 10-foot-tall concrete panels for removal by crane. Eight concrete sections, each weighing over 13,000 pounds, were cut and removed from the building.

Operators completed 368 feet of wall sawing and core drilled 46 holes up to 10 inches in diameters through the 12-­inch-­thick concrete walls of the Houston Chronicle building.

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Company: Precision Concrete Cutting of Carey
Location: Carey, Ohio
Category: Industrial Renovation
Issue Published: September 2016

This winning company was contracted to perform around 1,100 feet of slab saw milling, including sections of radial cuts, to help refurbish and reinforce the factory floor of a plastics manufacturing facility. The factory owners found that an increased volume of material carts being moved around the factory floor had caused grooves to form in the concrete. This had led to navigation problems with the carts and a reduced amount of control over their movements.

The contractor was tasked with milling 1,026 feet of 0.25-inch-deep and 4-inch-wide slots in the concrete floor slab, which formed two tracks that ran parallel around the factory floor spaced 50 inches apart. Lengths of 4-inch-wide, 0.25-inch-thick steel bearing plates were installed in the slots to reinforce the floor. Only two days were allocated to complete the refurbishment.

A 65-horsepower slab saw was fitted with 18 blades with spacers on a modified shaft to perform 35 feet of radial milling work. By attaching a pivot point to the saw, operators were able to achieve the desired series of radial cuts, some measuring up to 11 feet in length.

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Company: J.P. Hogan Coring & Sawing Corp.
Location: Staten Island, New York
Category: Infrastructure Renovation
Issue Published: June 2016

In the case of this year’s Infrastructure Renovation Award winner, the challenge was to breach a 54-inch-thick reinforced concrete slurry wall 25 feet below the ground. The opening created had to be angled and accommodate a 72-inch-diameter supply line that was to be attached to the shaft of a new water siphon in Brooklyn, New York.

The contractor had a custom 79-inch-diameter, 5-foot-long bit fabricated for the job. Using a hydraulic 45.6 CIR motor, the contractor core drilled at a 15-degree compound angle to a depth of 44 inches.

The 54-inch-long concrete core was extracted by crane and weighed approximately 23,000 pounds.

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Company: Core Cut Ltd.
Location: Scotland, United Kingdom
Category: Roads, Bridges & Airports
Issue Published: December 2016

The winner of this category took the lead role in the removal of 10,000 tons of concrete in the tunnel of a major rail station in Scotland, U.K., and is only the second international Concrete Openings award winner. The existing concrete track slab within the tunnel had been in place for 40 years and, due to the impact of continuous use and the effects of water infiltration, was showing signs of significant degradation.

The contractor’s work consisted of core drilling almost 8,500 holes measuring over 4 inches in diameter and 20 inches deep, over 9,000 feet of track saw cutting, almost 30,000 feet of longitudinal and transverse slab sawing, plus the use of robotic demolition equipment to break and remove sections.

The work was conducted on a 24/7 basis by rotating teams, ensuring no downtime and this commitment led to the contractor delivering six days ahead of schedule.