Blogs

It's 100 degrees outside. Your steering wheel is approximately the temperature of the sun. The air conditioner is doing its best. Then you see it. A section of pavement ahead looks like somebody pushed the road together from both ends and made it pop upward. Sometimes it happens fast enough to become a traffic hazard. The road buckled. But why? Concrete looks pretty solid. How does a material strong enough to carry tractor-trailers suddenly decide to stand up in the middle of the highway? The sh …

Some structures are instantly recognizable. You can see a massive cooling tower from miles away. Wide at the bottom. Narrow through the middle. Then wider again near the top. It looks a little like an enormous concrete hourglass. And if you've ever driven past a power plant and seen one releasing a giant white cloud into the sky, you may have wondered two things: Why is it shaped like that? And what exactly is coming out of it? The answers are connected. That strange shape isn't just architectur …

Every small town seems to have one. A giant tank sitting way up in the air with the town's name painted across it. Sometimes it's the first thing you see coming into town. Sometimes it's decorated. Sometimes it's been standing there so long nobody really notices it anymore. But if you stop and think about it, a water tower is kind of strange. We take hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of gallons of water and deliberately put it high above the ground. That requires a massive structure. En …

Most buildings look like they're sitting on the ground. Sometimes that's a little misleading. The building you see above ground may actually be supported by foundations extending dozens of feet below it. Sometimes much farther. They're called piles, and while they disappear underground once construction is finished, they may be doing some of the hardest work in the entire building. So why go through all that trouble? Why not just build a foundation, put the building on it, and call it a day? Bec …

Concrete cracks. There. We said it. Not exactly the opening line the concrete industry would put on a billboard, but it's true. Concrete is one of the most useful construction materials in the world. We build foundations, highways, bridges, sidewalks, parking garages, warehouses, dams, and entire buildings with it. It's strong. It's durable. And given enough time and the right conditions, it is probably going to crack somewhere. Which brings us to all those lines, cuts, and gaps you've seen in c …