The customer who had to short stack with crazy timeline contacted us about one of their larger stacks. This 350' concrete stack had a failed interior liner. The emissions from their boilers were now starting to corrode the concrete itself. To extend the lift of their stack we suggested a new liner. Spraying a special gunite liner will protect the concrete and extend the life of the stack. The only problem is getting the right volume and pressure of water and wet, heavy concrete from a truck to a moving platform 350' in the air. I spent several weeks lining up all of the needed parts from lifts to air compressors to earth movers to hydroblasters to workers. Weeks of planning came down to 5 days of execution from door open to door close. I'd spent the week prior on site recieving and placing equipment so when the project started everything was ready. Due to limited space we ended up shuttling over 100,000 lbs of concrete across the plant and into the gunite trucks in the middle of a shutdown (which meant there were hundreds of other contractors on site). After 2 days of setting up the lifts, hydroblasting and rigging of water and air we began to spray concrete. The concrete subcontract was great, he rotated people and kept his crews spraying nonstop for almost 20 hours the first day! The concrete was finished on day four and on day five we tore down and presented the happy customer a newly lined and now protected smokestack!
As you can tell from the picture, a lot of planning had to go into getting all of the equipment into such a small space. We had to get the exact water pressure and volume to all areas of that stack and spray concrete from top to bottom.
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