Quantock House Taunton

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Vurley

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Nov 29, 2017
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Taunton
How quickly a building can become derelict. Bad planning and poor construction? Bits were falling off this big modern office block in Taunton so it had to come down. Basically one man in a special machine demolished the lot.









Great jaws on the machine that could crush concrete and rip out windows with water jets to keep down the dust. I could have watched all day.The site is now being leveled for another building.
 
Depends on what was falling off. All the cases I have dealt with, were due in part to the steel reinforcing rods being to near the outer surface of the concrete covering said reinforcement. This allowed moisture to penetrate the concrete, wet the reinforcement and cause it to rust. Rust products have a greater volume than clean steel and the resulting expansion causes the concrete to spall and thus bits fall off. In the worst cases structural failure and collapse can happen, but usually one sees largish chunks that could threaten life falling off.
 
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Alkali Aggregate/Silica reaction even Dirus? especially in the West country. Don't like to use the C word!
 
Im just glad it wasn't an aesthetically pleasing building or the C word would be used in a totally different context;)

Very good shots of its demise!
 
Alkali Aggregate/Silica reaction even Dirus? especially in the West country.

An alkaline environment is certainly less harmful than an acidic one, for steelwork. But then nothing is straight forward, get the specifications wrong and eventually (may be) one might end up sitting in a pile of rubble. Many years ago I dealt with a problem on the production line of the Peterborough concrete sleeper plant. Production samples were failing the stress test and cracking in half - concrete spec was the same, reinforcing wire spec was the same. Eventually we found that the wire was produced at a new drawing mill owned by original supplier and only difference was that a higher spec drawing lubricant was used. The sleepers were cast in steel forms that had the reinforcing wires threaded through holes in their end plates. The wires were strung along a steel bed, through a pack of loose form end plates, a form was placed around the wires between two end plates, then filled with concrete and pushed to the opposite end of the bed and vibrated. When the line was full, the concrete was allowed to set and then the bits of exposed wires between each sleeper were chopped out, separating the individual sleepers. Testing proved that the set concrete was not adhering to the reinforcing wires - eventually it dawned that in pushing the filled forms down the line of reinforcing wires, one was actually cleaning all the drawing lube and dirt off the wires, allowing proper adhesion - Only that process did not remove the newer high spec oil! The old oil had worked for years, so it was re-specified immediately - a case of 'one step forwards, three steps backwards!' As is true in many instances, new is not always better, especially if one does not research the process properly.
 

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