Lehigh Southwest Cement - Over 75 Years of Building History

Many familiar structures in the western U.S. have been built with Lehigh Southwest cement. The Cypress Parkway (photo on left), the Pardee Dam, the Bay Bridge, the Delta Mendota Canal, runways at Beale and Travis Air Force Bases and more recently the Oakland Coliseum and the Aquarium of the Pacific at Long Beach, all were built with Lehigh Southwest cement as an integral component. 

Miller Children's Hospital - 2007  Long Beach, CA--Standard Concrete Pour for Prieto Construction

Standard Concrete, the ready-mix division of Lehigh Southwest Cement Co. in Southern California, poured a 2,500 yard project at 250 yds/hr on May 11th. 

The job was especially challenging because of the tight work area.  The pour required precise planning over several meetings coordinating the boom pump locations, truck staging and wash out areas.  Fortunately, Standard offers Enviroguard as a wash out option, which alleviates the concern for wash out bin location.  Prieto was extremely satisfied with the work.

Paramount Building - 2001

The Tallest Precast Concrete Building West of the Mississippi is Topped Off in San Francisco.

For the past 2 years, South Valley Materials, has been supplying ready-mix concrete to Mid-State Precast, a Limited Partnership of Charles Pankow Builders, headquartered in Altadena.   What started as a small precast operation employing 20 people has now mushroomed to over 120 employees.  This growth is largely the result of an innovative precast concrete structural system developed by Pankow in cooperation with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the University of Washington.  

This unique system consists of precast columns, girders and beams which offer a superior ductile moment resisting frame intended for areas of high seismic activity. This innovative system has been featured in ACI and PCA journals and literature and even found its way into the July issue of Popular Science. 

This building is the tallest precast concrete building west of the Mississippi River and the first high-rise to use this new structural system.  It is also the tallest precast building in the world to be constructed in a high-seismic area (San Francisco is in seismic zone 4).

This project created several challenges for South Valley Materials.  Pankow needed concrete mixes that would achieve 8,000 psi in 28 days.  Typical concrete mixes in the Central Valley of California are designed for 3,000 to 5,000 psi.  But South Valley Materials met the challenge and developed strong mixes which achieved as much as 11,500 psi in 28 days.  Another challenge was achieving high-early strengths so the precast pieces could be removed from the forms and tensioned after two days.

Montreaux Resort - 2000

The Montreaux Resort in Nevada, is an excellent example of the use of Insulated Concrete Forms (ICF) in concrete buildings. ICFs are stay-in- place hollow blocks, panels or planks made of plastic foam that construction crews stack into the shape of the wall (like Lego^® blocks). Workers fill the center of the units with rebar and concrete to create a monolithic reinforced structural wall. ICF can be formed into almost any shape and finished in many different ways.

Knauf Fiber Glass - 2000

A fast-track project in Shasta Lake City involved a huge pour of 4,000 cubic yards of concrete, which included 1,000 tons of Lehigh Southwest type I-II cement. This project is interesting because the floor slabs are required to be four feet thick to accommodate large machinery.

Dannon - 1999

The Dannon bottled water plant at the base of Mount Shasta consumed 5,500 cubic yards of concrete utilizing Lehigh Southwest cement. 

Network Associates Coliseum - 1996

In 1996, 14,000 tons of Lehigh Southwest cement was used in the reconstruction project at the former Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum. This project would normally have taken three years to complete but was "fast tracked" and completed in nine months. 

The Central Valley Project – 1950s

Over two hundred thousand tons of Lehigh Southwest cement went into the construction of the Friant-Kern and Delta-Mendota canals, the two major irrigation waterways of the Central Valley project. These canals are essential to agriculture in the Central Valley of California. 

The Bay Bridge -1934

During the depression, the construction of the Bay Bridge from San Francisco to Oakland kept the Lehigh Southwest plant running with the single largest order for cement in its then 25-year history. Lehigh Southwest cement was used in the construction of the giant center anchorage and the deep-water piers upon which the towers for the bridge rest. Just one of the piers in the bridge contains 17,724 cubic yards of concrete, and is equivalent in height to a 48-story building. Before the bridge, people relied on ferries to cross the bay.