Tilting Hill Street building…$30M being spent to underpin entire structure

May 15, 2014 News

By Rabindra Rooplall
The tilting four-storey Hill Street, Lodge storage building will be underpinned by 52 steel piles. Concrete mixtures will be

Camex Restaurant Inc. Chief Executive Officer Terrence Campbell.

poured into the steel piles in order to fully stabilize the building, thus preventing it from leaning any further, according to proprietor and Camex Restaurant Inc. Chief Executive Officer Terrence Campbell.
This exercise will entail an additional $30M which will now form part of the construction cost.
“The labour charges for driving the steel piles were $12M, the steel piles themselves are about $10M, the engineers fee is $2.5M and each one of these foundations take a truck load of cement at 4000 pounds per square inch (PSI) just to seal off.
“Some might say why spend that much. Well if we tear the building down we would still have to spend more in the long run…If this was a hotel we would have pulled it down, but it is just a storage facility for boxes, cups, flour and other items used for dry storage. No one will be living in the building.”
Explaining that for underpinning of the building there is no need for concrete to be poured into the steel but this will still be done. Campbell explained that the steel pipes will last between 75 and 100 years. However, to further seal and secure all aspects of the foundation, concrete will be poured into the hallow section of the steel pipes, “so that if the steel pipes ever rust the concrete columns will remain. Once that is done a one-inch pipe will be driven down as much as five feet and it will be tied to each other and then a steel grid will be placed around each of the nine columns to completely stabilize the entire structure.”
The steel piles have gone down to a depth of 70 feet. The businessman said that the problem is not the building, but the specific weight that was placed in that corner by a cantilever.
A cantilever is a beam anchored at only one end. The beam carries the load to the support where it is forced against by a moment and shear stress.
He further explained that once every column is secured the building will not lean any further; it will be fully secured.
Emphasizing that there was no collusion between him and the city council to pass the plan for the building, Mr. Campbell said, “As a businessman I never paid a cent in bribes. I would like anybody in the country to call ‘I paid a bribe’ at the Ministry of Home Affairs and report my name.
“I have been in business since 1984 and started off a business in 1987. I do not pay bribes. For Churches Chicken at Avenue of the Republic, Robb Street, we were paying rent of over $1M a month for one year before we got permission for the change of use from a pawn broker into a restaurant, many businessmen in this country will pay that $1M to somebody and get the permission in a month.

Some of the steel pipes being used around the foundation of the building to further strengthen the entire structure.

“I continued to pay a million a month in rent rather than pay a bribe…each of my staff knows how I am. They cannot even pay a traffic policeman a bribe because I don’t encourage those things.”
He emphasised that the plan of the building was done years ago and it was always a four-storey building on the plan. There is also a plan to build a restaurant on another spot as soon as the building is completed within the next two months.
The CEO of Camex noted that the lesson has been learnt at his expense and he is in full support of having a soil test done the next time he is undertaking construction of high rise buildings.
Adding that suggestions were also made pertaining to digging down to the foundation and taking a 50-tonne jack to raise the building back up, Mr. Campbell said he does not think that there is such a level of engineering in Guyana and to import such skill would be too costly for just a storage building, since there is not a crack on any column or any part of the building.