Posted on 02/16/2014 4:31:57 PM PST by BenLurkin
LOS ANGELES (CBSLA.com) — Developers made history Sunday at the site of the former Wilshire Grand hotel in downtown Los Angeles.
Adjudicator for the Guinness Book of World Records Michael Empric announced just after 11:30 a.m. that workers had broken the world record for the longest continuous pour.
The Wilshire Grand has a largest pour of 21,200 cubic yard, which is a new Guinness World Records title,” Empric said.
The Associated Press reports that the concrete pour of 82 million pounds of concrete lasted over 18 hours. The concrete was poured into a massive pit in order to build the foundation for the much-anticipated, 73-story tower.
“It’s a symbol of a Los Angeles that’s coming back,” Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said Saturday. “It’s putting the recession in the rear-view mirror, creating jobs.”
Along with breaking the world record, planners had also expected to save funds due to the consecutive pouring as opposed to taking breaks in between.
The $1 billion project includes office space, restaurants, retail, and 900 hotel rooms.
The hotel is scheduled to open in 2017.
the heat of hydration actually makes the concrete set faster. It also makes it expand too much and crack. The heat is a problem with thick structures.
Actually, some of the tallest buildings in San Francisco and LA have the greatest structural integrity thanks to isolation pads and dampers as part of their design, which most older masonry buildings lack.
When my friend put an addition on his West LA house, the addition was built on an isolation pad and expansion joints were designed to allow for lateral movement. He got me an invitation to see the dampers in one of the LA skyscrapers and meet with one of the structural engineers. Even the plumbing and electrical allow for severe vertical and lateral changes. As an architect I would feel more comfortable in that skyscraper than most of the old multi-family apartment buildings in LA.
Many years ago, I visited a temple in Kyoto that has withstood numerous earthquakes since being built 400 years ago. There wasn’t a single nail or spike in the structure nor any mortar or grout. All the walls were connected to a central support, allowing for severe lateral movement - pretty amazing.
Well, if they were worried about concrete setting up in the bucket, I'd imagine within a few buckets poured, that the first bucket would start setting up.
Also, rebar would have to be set in place, as well as cooling pipes. So, I imagine they might only do a couple of feet a day per cube. But I really don't know.
Most of the time it is impossible to get the body out when someone falls into a large live pour such as they would do on a dam. 20 to 25 cubic yards or more in one dump is a lot of concrete to be trying to fish out a corpse from.
Lots of fun.
“There are no bodies in the dam.”
But, but , but... There was a song about it.
I was a dam builder across the river deep and wide
Where steel and water did collide
A place called Boulder on the wild Colorado
I slipped and fell into the wet concrete below
They buried me in that great tomb that knows no sound
But I am still around..I’ll always be around..and around and around and
around and around
Respectfully, they have pretty much mastered how to build skyscrapers in SoCal that withstand quakes. I was in one, in 1990 during a seismic event, it shook like crazy, but no damage. They are built on gigantic rollers. You may recall the ‘94 event in Northridge. Most of the fatalities were in a three story apartment building. There were freeway collapses, the scoreboard at Anaheim Stadium tumbled into the seats, damage occurred as far as 80 miles from the epicenter, and it was felt in Las Vegas, nearly 300 miles away. None of the high rise buildings in the zone were catastrophically damaged.
When the light hits the face of the dam just right.... you can make out the impressions of the faces....
Really.
http://tinyurl.com/m57xu66
Hoover dam serendipitously utilized non-reactive aggregate in the mix, and that concrete turned out to be just about some of the best concrete you could make, even to today’s standards.
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