Earlier this year, Wells Concrete was awarded the Franklin Light Rail Maintenance Facility addition in Minneapolis with general contractor, LS Black. The bidding documents showed 75’ access to set the panels and the power lines used for the trains would be taken down for safety accommodations...

Often times we get asked about the fire rating for a total precast structure that incorporates precast double tees.  In this blog I will walk you through the steps.  For this process we are going to make the following assumptions:  10’-0 wide double tees (stem spacing is 5’-0 o.c.; Double tee...

In today’s paper where I live, one of the headlines was, “Blaze destroys condo project.” The story goes on to describe how fire fighters doused the wood and steel structure with water. The building was a total loss. Fortunately no lives were lost and no one was injured fighting the fire.

This methodology, commonly referred to as ‘Hardened Construction’, allows the engineer to pick a wind speed that is lower than the 250 mph and use a standard ASCE 7 design criteria.  With 98.8% of all wind events being that of and EF-3 or less we choose to work this ideology with a wind speed of...

Dangerous and deadly storms are happening all too often.  As we clean up Mother Nature’s devastation, talk inevitably arises of how to best guard against future destruction.  There’s a simple answer that is being used to create safe new structures: precast concrete.  With components that include