If you like constructing things there’s nothing more exhilarating than a concrete pour. For me there was always a charge in the air on the day of the pour even if it was just a 60 or 70-yard home foundation. 

I remember standing on a small hill overlooking a job as the sun came up on a chilly morning. The forms were in place, the bar was laid and tied, in-slab things like heating tubes were tied down and tested, plumbing and electrical pipes were pointing to the sky and a small band of concrete gladiators drank hot coffee staring into the distance for the sight of the first truck. There was really nothing more perfect, or more precarious, all at the same time. In a way it is like being at the point of no return. The planning had been done, the work appeared to be up to standard and now everything was going to be tested to see if that really was the case.

The big pours of course are a culmination of many hundreds of hours of planning and coordination so it’s almost like you are at the ultimate point of no return. It will either go down in history as a success, or will be remembered as the day all hell broke loose. Few of these things go wrong because there is just so much risk that there is a constant stream of people checking on things. Still all involved know there is a multitude of things that can go wrong and so smart ones have backups planned for every possible scenario they can imagine.

Recently SunCal Companies poured 2,400 cy at the Marblehead Coastal master-planned community in San Clemente, CA.

This pour used two shifts of 60 workers and did the whole thing in a little less than 20 hours. They were filling road bridge stems and soffits. The pour started at 4:30 am and finished up at midnight. At times there were 20 truckloads of concrete on site at once. Unfortunately neither the developer or owner posted any photos with the press releases. Those might have been interesting to look at.

But I did find some photos of a pour almost as large that happened in Fayetteville, AR in the spring of 2007. This pour was for a mixed-use structure called Underwood Plaza. This one started at 3 am and finished at 4 pm with a total of 1,895 yards poured. There were 23 people involved including the pump operators and supervisors. This appears to have been totally pumped and it also appears it was finished with screed boards and bull floats. This project took the time to document and make available a lot of pictures which you can view here.

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