We were tasked with removing 1200 m² of concrete removed inside a live Pick ‘n Pay.
While this is nothing new for us at DCCS, there were a lot of challenges faced in completing this task, besides the limiting the costs of cutting, the sheer weight of each block with the combined weight of the forklift had to be less than 5 tons, as there is a live basement below for cars to park, considering that the slab was 4m in the air and the fastest method to remove them was with a forklift, we had to consider that the coffer slab of 650mm thick had to have precise cuts to maximise the potential of slab removal to the time we had.
The job consisted of many elements to factor in, other than weight of each block, there was only one way to move between sections of the building on the first floor, in order to keep such a space open from one side to another, the slab to be cut in such a way that once we removed sections, we would still have a way to remove our machines from the top of the slab.
All of these aspects were complimented by the fact that water control was a huge initial concern for the the client, provided we would be running an average of 3 machine simultaneously, we had in installed 2 drains per bay, be coring through the floor, with pipes connecting each drain to a main filtering system we set up, to contain the concrete and separate the concrete from the water.
Additional teams were in place with vaccums to contain any water that was not initially caught by the drains.
However we did manage to work out the finer details and got the floor removed in a matter of days.
We were then onto our last task of the removal, removing the walkways we had created, and the massive 2.3m wide edge beam, Well at DCCS we never back down from a challenge, and got to work dropping the beams within the weight restrictions and safely put all the blocks from the removal outside, where an additional team was demolishing and carting away.
