The first new FM tower in LA county in over 50 years is coming to Los Angeles at the 93.5 frequency. Over $2 million dollars have been invested in the new 93.5 tower.
Below is a blog outlining some of the recent progress of the tower project.
August 8th, 2008
Today we poured the foundation for the new tower! It’s finally beginning to look like a proper pad for the tower. It took 4 cement trucks and over 34 cubic yards of concrete to create this foundation. That’s over 4,000 pounds per cubic square yard which equals out to 134,000 pounds of concrete. Add to that the steel foundation cage that weighs about 7,000 pounds…for a total over 141,000 pounds of weight!
If you’ve never seen concrete or cement being poured, it’s quite a sight. It’s a race against the clock...you’ve got to work quickly and precisely as the concrete keeps flowing. Even distribution is key. Once the concrete has settled into the area you’ve poured, you then smooth out the finish with a trowel.
When pouring concrete for this foundation, they had to compact the concrete to a very thick density. If you look closely at the photos, you’ll see one of the builders using a vibrating rod to flush out any air that is trapped in the wet concrete. His job while the concrete is being poured is to make sure that every since square inch of concrete is clear of any air. This condenses the concrete and makes for a truly solid foundation slab.
Concrete is one of the most commonly used building materials known to man. More concrete is used world-wide more than any other man-made material! Concrete is a combination of Cement and other cementitous materials such as ash and rock.
Now that the foundation has been poured - we need to wait a week for it to fully cure and be ready to begin installing the tower. In the meantime, we’re going to begin putting in our grounding system. We have to insert four individual grounding rods 8 feet into the solid earth around the tower.
Once they are inserted, a solid piece of copper wire (four inches in height) will wrap around the rods and join them all together. This will insure that the tower is properly grounded and safe.
Keep coming back for more updates as we continue with building our new tower!