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CC&B "Craftsmen"
Perform Precision Cutting at Florida Sears Store
Starting a major retail store remodeling project during peak
Christmas shopping season may seem just a bit risky and perhaps
ill-timed to most shopkeepers, but when professionally-trained
Concrete Cutting & Breaking, Inc. operators are part of
the renovation team, the risks don't loom quite as large.
Sears & Roebuck, one of the anchor stores
at the popular Aventura Mall in Aventura, Florida, undertook
a large-scale expansion of their facilities that would add
50,000 square feet of floor space. Construction on this project,
which would create two additional levels of merchandise showroom,
began during the week of December 2, 1997.
Part of the renovation plans required the
removal of an exterior concrete block wall. MHS Contracting,
the General Contractor hired to oversee this fast-track project,
knew they would need a highly-skilled cutting contractor to
create the precise openings for the windows and doors of the
new store addition. MHS called on Concrete Cutting & Breaking,
Inc. - Miami, Florida - who they knew possessed the knowledge
and expertise to get the job done quickly and efficiently.
The exterior wall, located near the main
entrance, was comprised of a double course of 8" and
4" concrete blocks and also served as the interior wall
of the store. Using a combination of hand sawing and wall
sawing, a total of 3,500' of the 14" thick wall was removed
in 11' by 26' sections, weighing nearly 14 tons each.
Sears had stipulated that store operations
must not be interrupted during the renovation. Just two short
feet away from the top of the 36" diameter blade used
to make these cuts, a false wall was erected by the General
Contractor to protect shoppers inside the store and form a
barrier to contain construction debris. CCB operators had
to be very precise with their cuts and exercise extreme caution
not to damage the temporary wall or in any way jeopardize
the safety of the customers.
The next phase of the renovation involved
the excavation of a foundation wall buried 18' below ground,
a task that would take the General Contractor more than a
month to complete. Once the area was excavated and cleared,
CCB operators moved in with wall saws and core drills to cut
and remove six 14' by 22' openings.
CCB performed their own debris removal,
but the process still took precious hours from an already
tight schedule. Every massive section cut from the building
was removed by a backhoe, transferred to a dumptruck, and
deposited in a landfill located nearly 20 miles away. Even
though CCB's operators were limited to cutting only as much
wall as could be secured and waterproofed each day, they managed
to complete the job in a remarkable seven days - one full
day ahead of schedule.
During the course of this project, the CCB
operators cut and removed:
- 720' of 4" thick brick wall with hand sawing
- 650' of 8" block wall with hand sawing
- 570' of 14" thick concrete wall with wall sawsing
- 48 corner holes, 8" in diameter by 14" deep
with core drilling
In total, more than 5,500 square feet of
concrete sections and debris, weighing nearly 280 tons, was
removed from the job site.
Diamond cutting tools in the hands of seasoned
professionals made it possible for Sears to continue business-as-usual
during what could have been an extremely disruptive process.
Customers inside the store were scarcely aware of the tremendous
operations taking place just beyond the back wall. And while
CCB was able to complete the job with only minimal vibrations,
any tremors the shoppers may have felt were probably attributed
to holiday jitters!
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| Wall
sawing is used to cut 14' by 12' sections. |
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| One
of sixteen 14-ton wall sections fall to the ground. |
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| Slab
sawing was performed on large sections for easy removal. |
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