Pile driving for Canad Inns tower starts
In case you haven't been by the Alerus Center in the past couple of days, you might be interested to know that pile driving is now officially underway for the Canad Inns hotel tower. This is a major part of the early phase of construction. Take a drive down 42nd Street and look for the tall "pipes" sticking out of the ground north of the Alerus Center. Those pipes are located right where the 13-story hotel will stand. The construction site is now blocked off from us curious spectators, but you can actually still get up quite close to the area where they are driving pile.
Pile driving is a means of using the stronger lower soil layers to hold the weight of the building instead of just plopping the foundation down in the relatively loose and unstable upper layers. In other words, without pile driving, the Canad Inns tower could practically "blow over" in a strong windstorm. Yikes!
It doesn't appear that they have moved earth yet for the water park.
I wonder how the loss of so much parking area is going to go with the upcoming Aerosmith concert...
Digg 
del.icio.us 
Posts
3 comments:
I can't wait to see how many comment postings this gets. You sure have a popular blog.
This is a sad day for Grand Forks, The Alerus, and the developers that were lured by free land and the other incentives.
Of course that's my opinion. Time will tell.
Alerus Marketing Rep to convention prospect...
"We have an attached hotel now". "Oh really, what flag?", said the prospect. "Canad Inn...what?...Canad...who?"
(silence)
There's an old saying in the Hotel Biz..."The only one to make money in the hotel business is the 3rd owner".
I'm not sure of just how tall a building needs to be before pile driving is required. From what I have heard, our soil around here is pretty loose (I think that is also one of the reasons why it is so good for agricultural purposes) so we may need to use that form of foundation more than other areas. I think you would need to use pile driving no matter where you built a 13-story building, but I'm not sure. From local observation, it seems to me like most buildings that have gone up around here didn't require pilings. I know that both event centers and the Grand Forks County Office Building did all use pile driving.
Post a Comment