We did some cool stuff at work today

[pritch]

Today was the day I had been having nightmares about for the last 2 years. I'm a construction superintendent and I'm 24 months into a 26 month project, and today was windmill tower day. This is an elementary school in South Weber, Utah. We added 2 new buildings and extensive remodeling in the exsisting building. This is in a very windy place, so one of the features is these 2 windmills and today we had to set the poles.

At the last minute I had to run grab my camera, so I missed the first one, the smaller of the two, coming off the ground:



The plan calls for these to be set into a 10' deep by 4' square hole, with this rebar cage around it. This is where we hit the first snag. The crane couldn't lift the pole high enough to set it into the rebar by about a foot and a half. We ended up having to lean that 600 pound rebar cage over enough to stick the end of the pole into it and then stand the whole thing up:



Our plan was to tie the rebar to these lugs the erector welded to the pole so we could set both together into the hole. That part all worked pretty good:



We set these I beams across the hole and those lugs bore the weight (approx. 6600 pounds) of pole and rebar while we pumped the hole full of concrete:



Braced it up with some deadman blocks and tilt-up braces and went to lunch. After lunch we would do the big one.