Concrete Cutters Celebrated at Las Vegas Awards Ceremony

Concrete Cutters Celebrated at Las Vegas Awards Ceremony

The 7th Annual Concrete Openings Awards ceremony was held during February’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 2019.

A crowd of show attendees and members of the industry media gathered around the association’s exhibit booth as CSDA Executive Director Erin O’Brien led the proceedings. First held at World of Concrete 2014, the ceremony showcases the 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 2019 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 2020 Awards later in the year. For more information about the winning projects, the awards or about CSDA, call 727-577-5004 or email erin@csda.org.

And the winners are…

Company: Interstate Sawing & Demolition

Location: West Bend, Wisconsin

Category: Building Construction Shopping Mall Demolition with Customized Robot Fleet

• Two floors of an operating shopping mall needed to be removed without damaging the existing structure or disturbing the nearby residential neighborhood

• The distance between floors was 21 feet and the weight limit on the existing floor was 7,000 lb. No robot on the market would meet those standards, so Interstate developed their own custom fleet of five Brokk and Husqvarna demo robots

• Over 150,000 square feet of concrete was crushed and removed to create space for the new floors to be constructed

• The four-man crew operated in two 10-hour shifts and battled extreme cold, working in confined spaces and working at significant heights

Company: Holes South Texas, LLC

Location: Houston, TX

Category: Industrial Renovation Diamond Wire Sawing Slices Through 2,000 Tons of Concrete at Texas Port

• At the Port of Corpus Christi, a $325 million project to expand the port required demolition of existing concrete structures over water and on land

• Mooring structures, buildings, stockpiled concrete, loading docks, foundations and light poles all needed to be demolished and removed, totaling over 2,000 tons of concrete and 1,790 tons of steel

• Innovative wire sawing techniques were used to break these structures into smaller pieces to be lifted out and hauled away, all operations completed by Holes. Over 2,200 feet of wire sawing was completed

• The team had to contend with strong currents, high winds and waves and heavy fog over a period of six months while pulling double duty cutting, breaking and hauling the concrete and steel for recycling

Company: Concrete Cutting Company, LLC

Location: Port Chester, NY

Category: Building Construction Concrete Tunnel Damaged by Superstorm Sandy Renovated with Custom-Built Equipment

• The lighting, plumbing and fire suppression systems were all damaged by standing water left by the storm and had to be removed without contaminating the tunnel

• The contractor designed and built a wall saw truck mounted with two blades attached at an angle to create a “V” cut, which would allow the existing plumbing, electrical and lighting to be removed in one encapsulated piece

• Wall saw cuts were made 13 feet high, eight inches deep and nine inches wide with a 52-degree angle. Each cut was 15 inches, at which point the truck would move to continue with the next 15-inch cut

• Approximately 60,000 linear feet of cuts were made along the tunnel walls, taking over 180 6.5-hour shifts to complete over a two-year period

Company: Concrete Technology Services Mid-Atlantic, Inc.

Location: Glenn Dale, MD

Category: Industrial Renovation Historic Federal Building Receives Modern Facelift

• A 1960’s era federal building in Washington D.C. was undergoing a $220 million renovation with the goal of preserving the simple strength of the original architecture while allowing for a modern expansion

• The contractor was to perform a structural engineering analysis of the building, engineer and install all shoring, remove a 12-floor elevator core structure, remove the top roof, scarify the lower roof, remove the roof parapet, demo and cut precast covers and perform all GPR imaging

• In total, 6,000 linear feet of steel beams and 5,000 cubic yards of concrete were removed, 100,000 square feet of concrete was scarified and thousands of holes were drilled

• A custom-built remote control core drill rig allowed two core drills to simultaneously tackle the challenge of drilling over 2,000 holes through wide-flanged steel beams encased in concrete