| Ingenuity and hustle on London Road Bridge bring project in on time |
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| Ingenuity and hustle on London Road Bridge bring project in on time |
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Garcia and his company helped meet a tight deadline
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In construction, one thing leads to another—the forms have to be erected before the cement can be poured; the cement has to be cured before the pavement can be laid. Timing is everything.
When one step in the process doesn’t proceed as planned, a can-do attitude can make up for lost time.
That’s the situation ODOT and Capital Concrete Construction faced near Cottage Grove in replacing London Road Bridge. The project team had promised local stakeholders—city officials, state legislators, county commissioners and business owners—that it would limit the closure of nearby London Road Bridge and have the structure and roadway reopened in time for the summer travel season.
That commitment was jeopardized when utility work on the project fell seven weeks behind schedule. So ODOT approached the contractor, Capital Concrete Construction, about picking up the slack.
“Capital worked with us by putting in overtime, bringing in additional workers and equipment at critical junctures, and using higher strength concrete, which allows simultaneous pours, to speed up the schedule,” said Russ Olson, project manager at ODOT.
“We accelerated our pace, working six days a week, 12 hours a day,” said owner Ken Garcia. “Nights aren’t productive, or we would have put a crew on then, too. Most of my employees have been with me 10 or 20 years, and we know we can count on each other.”
Garcia is no stranger to hard work. He started his construction career as an apprentice to a cement mason; when unemployment was high in 1987 and Garcia was laid off, he simply founded his own firm and began with small jobs such as curbs and sidewalks.
Twenty-one years and more than 30 additional employees later, Capital, headquartered in Aumsville, is an increasing presence in the construction industry, excavating, laying pipe and pouring concrete on projects up and down the Willamette Valley. Recently, the company completed one of many jobs it has performed as a prime contractor for ODOT, replacing three bridges and repairing two others, also in Cottage Grove.
To keep to the accelerated schedule on the London Road Bridge, Garcia and his crews canceled vacations and worked through the winter.
“We did what we had to do—wore lots of clothes, added warming fires to the job site,” Garcia said.
“They did a seven-month job in five months and enabled us to keep our promise to Cottage Grove,” Olson said. “That above-and-beyond attitude, especially in an Oregon firm, is exactly what we look for in a construction partner.”
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