Santiam Hall Remodel, Nov. 13th - Dec. 2nd

Over the course of the last term, construction crews have been working to install shear walls to the Santiam Hall and Industrial Arts A buildings in anticipation of an earthquake. The purpose of the shear walls is to absorb shock waves from said earthquake and redirect them down towards a building's foundation. The process of installing these walls is a lengthy one, documented with the photos below, taken over a period of 3 weeks.

The work begins by digging up parts of the concrete walkway adjacent to a building's walls, in order to get access to the walls' supports. Once the right depth has been reached, crews will begin drilling holes into the supports, as well as the walls themselves, to prepare for the next step. This process of drilling produces a large amount of concrete dust, which must be periodically cleaned up with an industrial vacuum, as seen above.

Once the trench has been completed, the real work begins. Rebar supports are stuck into
the holes dug into the walls, and kept in place with a special kind of construction-grade epoxy.

After the support rebar is put in place, additional rebar is attached to it in a grid pattern in order to extend the wall supports. Longer bars of rebar are also attached, which will be used to extend the grid upwards along the wall. Note the layers of holes lining the top of the wall; additional bars of rebar will be added into these as well to provide a strong foundation for the shear wall mounting.

Once all the rebar that needs to be directly attached to the building's foundation has been installed, the trench is then refilled with concrete. Several weeks later, one can hardly tell that the concrete was ever dug up in the first place.

Another grid of rebar is installed along the wall, using the supports added to the top and bottom. For the initial bars used to set up the grid, most of the installation work is done with a mobile lift. However, sometimes parts of it need to be adjusted, requiring a more direct approach. 

Once the initial grid has been set up all that remains is to add in additional bars of rebar to reinforce it. This more extensive work calls for the addition of a large array of scaffolding along the front of the building. Once the work is done the crews will shift their attention to doing the same in another area of the building.