Friday, December 9, 2011

Another Virginia Tech parking garage?

I never thought about parking until I actually starting driving to campus.  I normally leave my house about an hour early in order to get on campus and search for a parking spot.  I guess it makes sense that there are such a high demand for parking when there are about 27,000 students that go to Virginia Tech. I understand that not all the students have cars but if we assume that three eigths of the school drives then that is about 10,500 that demand parking.  That is why building another parking parking garage is neccessary.

Virginia Tech has hired Holder Construction to perform this construction.  The garage will be located behind the Wendy's on North Main Street and on Turner Street.  As of right now, their is one caisson drill on site, a few big excavators, a crawn crawler, and a few trucks.

Most of the construction that I observed was workers working on footings.  Some were doing framework on the dug footings and others where placing reinforced steel in areas where the framework was already completed.  There were also two Holder construction managers spraying lines on the ground.  I assume these pink lines are illustrating to the workers where the next footings have to be dug.

Below I am attaching some information that I collected while I was visiting the site.
In a previous blog, Decking starts at the Irish Pub, I talked about types of footings.  It seemed like the footings that were being used on the site were continuous footings and I will show you again.
              Figure 1                                                   Figure 2                                    Figure 3
The reason it is called a continuous footing is because the concrete is continuous. As you can see in Figure 2 the concrete is all one piece.  In figure 1 on the other hand you can see a lot of things going on. You can see the reinforcing cage, the formwork on the sides, the anchord bolts (the pieces of steal that you see coming out of the concrete), and also the concrete that has already been poured over the reinforcing.

Other things that I picked up on where the reinforcing cages for the caissons (Figure 4), the drill that was being used for the caissons (Figure 5), and tools sent down to a worker in the drilled hole (Figure 6)
                
                     Figure 4                                       Figure 5                                 Figure 6

This is all I have for today and I hope that you enjoyed some of the details I added.

Thank you for reading.
All the best,
Mic




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