'Tabletop' gets set at Weston 4 power plant site
ROTHSCHILD, Wis. (June 9, 2005) - The table is all but set, awaiting only the utensils needed to generate 500 megawatts once it goes online in June 2008.
Crews from County Materials and Miron Construction poured 1,900 cubic yards of ready-mix concrete Thursday (June 9) for the "tabletop" platform more than 30 feet in the air at the Weston 4 power plant under construction just south of Wausau. County Materials and Miron had to ensure an exacting surface for a $30 million Toshiba turbine, which is scheduled for delivery next March. Engineers traveled from Japan to inspect the site and left satisfied with the tight tolerances being met by the ready-mix concrete and the crews pouring it.
And with more than 100 "prime" contractors - each of which in turn hired numerous subcontractors - on site every day of the complex project, having all of the ready mix come from one supplier eliminated a major headache for Phil Hayes, Wisconsin Public Service project manager.
"It gives you a consistent mix and consistent pricing, and we have a consistent set of specifications," he said, adding that other options just didn't add up during the bidding process. "We balanced it against putting up our own batch plant on site. But then you've got to order aggregate, cement, things compound the issue like air permits. . Then what, buy trucks? "That's not our business. And when we're this close . we've got experts right in our back yard."
County Materials, primarily from two of its ready-mix locations, has delivered more than half of the 60,000 cubic yards of concrete it will provide for the project. That's enough to bury a football field under a 28-foot slab or build a sidewalk from Wausau to the Illinois state line.
The company had more than two dozen cement trucks in a steady rotation. Drivers waited patiently as two trucks at a time poured ready mix into each of a pair of pumper trucks that carried the concrete high above the rectangular, formed-in slab. There, workers manned the seemingly endless stream of concrete, spreading it around the deck about 18 inches at a time through layers of steel reinforcement while slowly filling a form that ranged in depth from 5 to 8 feet.
The finished surface will crown a bit to accommodate the weight of the equipment - some pieces of which can weigh 30 tons - in order to hold to tolerances that in some cases must be within thousandths of an inch.
County Materials, founded in 1946, operates 29 locations serving Wisconsin, Minnesota and Illinois. The family-owned, American-based company is an industry leader in the manufacture and distribution of concrete block, brick, ready-mix, hollowcore, pipe, pavers, retaining walls and Aggregate finish products for residential, commercial and municipal construction and landscaping.