At the General Motors Assembly Plant in Arlington, Texas, Barton Malow and its partners completed a mega-concrete-slab placement during the weekend of Jan. 13. Labor partner Lloyd Concrete Services Inc., Rustburg, Va., helped with the placement, while Unlimited Concrete Solutions, Columbus, Ohio, provided additional supervision and equipment.

The mega-slab spans 256,100 sq ft and features 8-in. steel fiber reinforced at 23 lb per cu yd, then hard-troweled as a continuous slab placement. The work took 32.5 hours, with an average of 315 cu yd of concrete placed per hour. Civil crews achieved an average grade within 3/16th of an in. across the placement. That level of accuracy kept the concrete purchase within 2% of the target.

Equipment included four laser screeds, four power rakes, 38 ride-on trowel machines, 12 walk-behind trowel machines, 10 saws-vacs and four steel-fiber conveyors. The team included 131 tradesmen, four supervisors, four safety representatives, 42 laborers, 62 finishers, two rodbusters, eight carpenters, two layout engineers and seven operators.

Redi-Mix Concrete provided material from four separate plants, with two additional plants as backup. The 160 trucks worked in a color-coordinated pattern during delivery. The team also set up Bekaert fiber conveyors on site, operated by Redi-Mix. Placement began at 9:30 p.m. on Jan. 13 and finished at 6:00 a.m. on Jan. 15.
 

Brasfield & Gorrie recently celebrated completion of steel work on Our Lady of the Lake Children’s Hospital in Baton Rouge. The six-story, 364,000-sq-ft hospital, set to open in 2019, will feature 80 beds, an emergency room, a surgical unit, a dedicated oncology unit and playgrounds on every floor. The final beams were signed by more than 1,000 people, including current and former patients, donors and supporters.
 

On Jan. 24, teachers, students and administrators celebrated the start of construction on the new Charter Oak Elementary School in Belton, Texas. When completed for the 2019 school year, the 82,300-sq-ft school will accommodate up to 800 students.

The school will offer a flexible 21st-century learning environment based on the building program developed through a collaboration between Belton ISD and O’Connell Robertson, which provided architecture, MEP engineering and interior design services. In addition to general and special-education classrooms, the school features specialty classrooms for art, music and computer stations.

The name Charter Oak commemorates an event in Belton history, when, under a live oak tree, Bell County held its first election in 1850. The oak tree still exists today, not far from the new school, near Poison Oak Road in Temple, Texas.