Located in Carquinez Regional Park in the hills of Martinez, CA, the Carquinez Radio Tower is a unique project for Webcor. This project, which will set up a new communications tower and electrical building for Contra Costa County, came to us as a $1.5 million change order to our Contra Costa County Administration Building Demolition and Redevelopment (ADR) project.

For us to begin demo on the Contra Costa Admin building in downtown Martinez, multiple active communication dishes and radio antennas located atop the roof of the building needed to be removed. The county chose to build a new tower in the hills behind the project to house the dishes and antennas. This new tower will also hold existing active KQED AM/FM antennas currently held by an aging tower in the hills next to the new project site. Once these AM/FM antennas have been transferred to the new tower, the county can demolish the old tower.

All of this work was supposed to be completed before our team mobilized at the Admin building project site. However, although the County managed the construction, they did not have the expertise to deliver the scope of work required. Since the County had already contracted Vanir Construction as the construction manager (CM) of the ADR project, they hired them for the same role at the Radio Tower project. Thanks to the relationship we had built with Vanir during the Newark Civic Center project and through the beginning of the ADR project, Vanir immediately asked Webcor to perform the general contracting services.

Our scope included grading, excavation, concrete foundations, transportation, placement of the electrical building and radio tower, electrical connections and grounding, and a new steel fence around the site. The project's location, atop a hill with only one suitable access road, posed an immediate logistical challenge. The road is long, narrow, and unpaved with many turns. The electrical building is a pre-fabricated modular design that will weigh 93,000 pounds when fully built. Knowing how challenging it would be to transport that building and a 50-foot-long radio tower to the top hill, we brought in Sheedy to help.

While the modular building was being assembled in Indiana, we were able to get the radio tower components delivered to Sheedy's yard in San Francisco, which gave them an opportunity to pre-fab the tower on the ground. Assembling this way was much easier than doing so on-site and facilitated the engineer's visual building inspection process to ensure everything was connected correctly before erecting it. Once the building was finally received, it was transported with the tower from San Francisco to the base of the hill.

Due to the building's size and weight, it was not safe to transport up the steep, uneven hill on a regular trailer. Sheedy planned to use a Goldhofer trailer system to drive the building up the hill. A Goldhofer trailer is a remote-controlled platform with a total of 16 wheels across 4 axels per 6-foot section. Each axel has hydraulic pistons that can be raised or lowered to adjust to changing road conditions to keep the platform level. Multiple sections can be linked together to operate as one unit, and every wheel can rotate a full 180 degrees, allowing the trailers to drive horizontally if needed.

After two unsuccessful attempts to drive the building up using lead cars to assist the Goldhofer trailer due to poor road traction, we had to call in a D10 cat crawler to pull it up.

Once we finally reached the top, we hoisted the building and tower into place within a day.

Webcor Concrete assisted with anchoring and leveling the building. Both structures were secured in place on Monday, August 8 � the culmination of six months of planning and coordination.

We are currently completing the final electrical grounding connections to the Buried Ground Ring and installing the steel fence. We anticipate completion before Labor Day.

Throughout the construction process, Contra Costa County has expressed their gratitude to Webcor and our trade partners for helping them complete this project. Thanks to our involvement, we avoided a major delay to our ADR project schedule, saving the county money and ourselves time.

In addition to his project management talents, Webcor Assistant Project Manager Hamza Ali Shallwani is a skilled filmmaker. His first film, "Behind the Site," documented work at San Francisco International Airport's Grand Hyatt Project; it was selected for screening at the 2019 San Francisco Independent Short Film Festival.

Now Hamza, working at the Bay Meadows Station 5 project with Webcor Concrete, is back with a new short film recognizing the heroes of our trade.

"I created this film to show my appreciation for Webcor Concrete's talented craftspeople; to give them something they can share with their families and children at home to celebrate their skills and convey the inspiring nature of the work they do every day," Hamza says.

Hamza produced, directed, and edited the video on his own using his Panasonic Lumix GH5 during the L2 Area A Vertical Day 2 pour on February 25. (In above photo, foremen preview the video during a 6:30 a.m. huddle.)

Visit Hamza's website for more information on his filmmaking.

To wrap up Women in Construction Week, we are sharing the second article in Webcor's continuing series, "Ask a Woman of Webcor." Today's question: What was the most difficult scope item you've had to coordinate and build?

Graciela is currently closing out the Living on Vine Project in Los Angeles, also known as the Four Seasons Residences.

"The most difficult scope I coordinated was the doors, frames, and hardware (DFH) at the San Bernardino Justice Center (SBJC). I had never managed DFH before and it seemed straightforward at first. As I dug into the task, I realized that there were so many aspects to coordinate. The SBJC had several wall types for both detention and non-detention facilities. The hardware consultant failed to coordinate the security system with the detention doors, so I had to sort through all the scenarios and figure out which doors required the security redesign. To add to the difficulty, we had unrealistic expectations about the "just in time" delivery. Once I factored in priority walls, detention areas, and phasing, there were about 100 deliveries expected for this scope alone!! The subcontractor almost had a heart attack when I sent him the delivery schedule."

Karen is currently assigned to Preconstruction & Estimating.

"The dining center at UC Merced was an all-steel building with lots of fancy dining equipment and MEPs (mechanical, electrical, plumbing) to make that equipment run smoothly, and although I can't take credit for coordinating the steel and installation of MEPs by myself, being involved with the coordination was definitely a challenge. What made it a challenge for me was mostly inexperience. It was my first time running trade coordination, and I just remember feeling like I was on fire (internally) having to run the BIM coordination meetings and often not sure if subs were just walking all over me because of my inexperience, and that translated to the field install as well. I learned so much through that process though and truly experienced the importance of leaning on your team and the experts in the rooms to make any difficult coordination effort possible. The most important thing I took from being on fire (internally) all the time was never being afraid to ask the 'dumb question' -- I got really comfortable with that. And as far as the steel structure goes, I'm still learning!"

Bhavana is currently working at the American Express SFO Centurion Lounge Renovation and Expansion.

"My most difficult scope was the MEP Sustainability Commissioning testing at San Francisco International Airport, Boarding Area B (BAB), in Phase 1. The reason for this was there were multiple BMS controls conversations with several people over the course of multiple years. The changes that occurred in the plan were documented, but not all the reasons were documented. When it was time for testing, the third-party agent was very new and difficult to deal with. In the initial tests, our subcontractor kept failing the test for reasons nobody could figure out. There were a lot of difficult conversations when we could not reason why there were multiple changes in the plan. Our subcontractors and MEP (mechanical, electrical, plumbing) team incorporated a rigorous pre-testing schedule to make sure we passed all the tests. The plan worked, and our subcontractors passed all the tests again in the span of two weeks. We recovered the commissioning schedule again, which was awesome. After the tests were complete, we signed off on HVAC controls testing for Phase 1 in 6 months' time, closing 400-plus punch list items. A huge kudos to the MEP team, including the subcontractors. The owner was very impressed, as this is big for a project of 100,000-plus square feet. In the next two phases, we, along with our subcontractors, passed everything in one go and literally had a minimum punch list because we already knew what to expect."