8-Storey Wonder of My World

It's 3:02AM right now... I needed ultimate peace around me, before I could start writing all this. Thankfully, the excitement still hasn't gone away. Right now, I'm looking over the Richness boards, its MySpace, my MySpace, and my AutoCAD drawings. Hahaha, talk about multi-tasking!

Today's school trip was a blast. We got to learn a lot of stuff and the Project Manager of the project talked a lot so we felt really comfortable with him. The project was 7-storey building, 8-storey, if you count the roof deck. They were actually finishing up on the project, it was about 90% structurally and 38% architecturally, done. The columns designed for the building were huge, the columns were 1mx1m in size, and they had a separate building built just for the power generators. The whole site was messy, with a lot of gray mud around.

The owner of the project was Lexmark, a printer company. The Project Manager said the whole project costs about PhP800M (about US$17,391,304.30). We were all pretty excited when they let us get near the Tower Crane. It was being held down by a bunch of concrete blocks, weighing 20 tons. Directly below it, some 20 people worked on fabricating the bored piles. They're made out of steel bars, about 6 meters high but they can be taller, made to look like circular columns, and they have even more bars encircling them around. Here's a picture to help explain what I just said.

That's a pile driver putting the bored pile into the ground. Okay, so what's the bored pile for? Based on what I've learned from the trip, it stabilizes the foundation of the structure that you're gonna be building. Right next to the almost finished building, they have started drilling holes into the ground while pumping Bentomite-treated water, to keep the soil from collapsing where the piles are gonna be. The piles are gonna be supporting a new 23-storey building. I don't know how much it's gonna cost though. But I so wish I get to manage a project as big as that. The Project Manager is managing 600 people including subcontractors. He said that he's already fired a couple of Project Engineers for being too lazy.

This entry might seem very boring to anyone's reading, but if you were there, you would be just as excited as I am even though you don't understand any of what I'm saying right now. We got to take pictures of the huge machines that they used on the site and they gave us samples of the finishings that they were using. I stared at this heavy-looking steel box-like thing that was left on a corner, but it looked pretty new. Then I read whatever was written on it. That's when I found out that it was part of the elevator that they were installing into the building. The Safety Engineer then asked us if we would like to see the inside of the building. Then he told us to not take the hardhats off at any cost. On the way to the building entrance, we passed by the building with the power generators. They were HUGE! I can only imagine how much the Electrical Engineers were making just by installing those generators. When we got to the entrance of the building, he told us we're only gonna be touring the 2nd floor. So we go up a flight of stairs, which was probably going to be the fire exit, because it was that narrow and it was steep. Then up another, then another, and another. Then one of my classmates mumbled, "We're going to the 2nd floor right? Why is it so far up?". When we finally got there, the Safety Engineer showed us the vacant area, kinda like a balcony where you can see the other buildings surrounding the structure. The wind blowing was just fantastic. It wasn't hot nor chilly at all.

A couple of minutes after resting from the climb up, we proceeded to the floor area. They used concrete boards as partitions for the offices.There were a lot of electrical wires around, a lot of people around, laborers, carpenters, engineers, just a lot of them inside the building. Questions popped up everywhere, which showed that the kids were really excited. Then we saw concrete hollow blocks on one corner. We started asking more questions about what was there, and why was it the only part of the building that had concrete block partitions. The Safety Engineer guided us there and we met up with the Head Mechanical Engineer there. Behind the partition was another HUGE machine. It was the main AC unit. It was my first time to see an AC unit that big. After briefing us on how the things worked, we went on our way out of the building. The Safety Engineer then pulled out a cigarette outside the building perimeter and told us about how big the project was and that the company had equipment that costs PhP8M(US$173,913.04) and it was tiny.

After the trip, we were exhausted. My legs were heavy, and I got mud on my pants and shoes. And we still had to go back to school. I had a quiz coming in an hour and I wasn't prepared for it. Heheh, but I got 90%. Bwahahaha! Ok, that was too obnoxious. I'm sorry.

So hopefully, I get to handle projects as big as this one someday.