Glacier Club - The McGraw Project
One of our projects that required some extra ingenuity was during the summer of 2017 at the Glacier Club for the McGraw job. The project was cliffside, which meant we needed to use a hydraulic breaker attachment in order to hammer out benches and switchbacks for the foundation excavation — through solid bedrock! Think that was enough of a challenge? The job stayed pretty exciting throughout!
The site was located directly above the sensitive golf course area and we had to keep tee boxes in consideration. Even more, the sheer steep to cliffside grades practically eliminated the possibility of drilling and blasting the rock and the lot size was small, relative to the home size.
The total home foundation excavation was 1,800 cubic yards, or 4,800 cubic feet. For the excavation, all excavated materials were hammered, then loaded into trucks and exported to a remote storage area. It took two excavators to “leapfrog” the material up the site and into trucks for export. Once there, we crushed the material to make suitable backfill, which was then brought back to the site and used to backfill the foundation.
Keeping things exciting, we had a complication at the storage site, which required us to bring back uncrushed spoils and crush them on-site.
But, due to the compactness of our crusher attachment, this was possible (in a very small area), where it would not have been with a conventional mobile crusher. Since we have the large hydraulic breaker (5,500 pound breaker mounted to a 60,000 pound excavator), the crusher attachment was ideally suited to this challenging site.
The challenge was great and the scope was comprehensive (tree and slash removal, extensive rock hammering, excavation, backfill for foundation construction, rock wall installation, driveway construction, all utilities (including relocation of LPEA transformer, CenturyLink pedestal, and Glacier communication pull box), extensive export and import, and crushing rock breaking to make suitable backfill on and off-site) but we got the job done and the team was solid throughout all of it. This job pushed our limits, but we were proud to know that in completing this one so successfully, we could handle just about anything.
