Restoration

I work in downtown St. Louis, which is nice, since I live in the City's South Side. I'm able to hop in my car and toodle down Highway 55. The downtown exit, even when under construction, is pretty easy to get through. Part of this ease of movement is the result of living in a city infrastructure for a million people, with only 400,000 residents.

Parking is a modest $80.00 a month, a sum less than the cost of parking for a few days in Chicago I learned last year. The parking garage where I stash my ride abuts the stadium where the Rams play, trucks pull and conferences large and small are held.

This garage predates the new stadium, and is showing its age. On every floor is found potholes, pools of crumbling cement, and thick sheets of plywood laid over steel reinforcing that has been exposed by disintegrating concrete. My engineer friend Ed tells me that this is a chronic problem with garages. Freeze/thaw cycles devastate the parking deck. Left unchecked, they would collapse.

Last year, bright orange outlines began to appear around these cankers, like the crime scene of a murdered polygon. Western Waterproofing began work on repairs these last few weeks, which unfold in a fascinating sequence.

First, diamond-saws are uses to cut the concrete floor, following the aforementioned outline. These polygons are rarely square, and seem to be designed to encompass as many lesions as possible in one surgical site. Next, air hammers are used to break the concrete up within the sliced concrete. The old concrete is allowed to fall to the deck below. Workmen using a miniature scooploader collect this fallen material, and hustle it off for disposal. Smaller debris is swept up, and amazing little powered dumptrucks, not much bigger than a golf cart, are used to haul it away to a giant dumpster outside.

This reveals the hidden rebar that lends its strength to the concrete floor. I haven't seen this, but I imagine that this old steel grid is removed, and replaced with fresh rods.

From the floor below, sturdy screw jacks hold plywood patches up, creating a floor for the void left behind by diamond saws, jackhammers, and cutting torches. New concrete is poured in and left to solidify. The seam between the old concrete and the new is probably sealed with some sort of durable elastomer, and after a few days, a new floor is ready to be driven on without risk of a tender tire meeting a lethal spear of rebar.

I've been pondering this repair process these last weeks. Rugged men and women wrangle powerful instruments to preserve a crumbling building. They do it with skill and without fanfare. The tools rumble, and the failing is replaced with new. In the end, a building whose foundation is sound is given new life. The repairs are not permanent, someday they will have to be repeated, but tomorrow is better than yesterday. Apply the metaphor as you will.

Tim McNabb