Today a crew installed our storm shelter in the garage floor of the house.
The storm shelter is a pre-formed concrete "cube" (technically it's 5'x7' and the sides are angled so it's not technically a cube *snort*). The concrete is delivered in two halves with a built-in door in the top half and the shelter comes with a steel ladder.
First the site of the shelter was marked on the ground and wall to be perfectly clear:
Then a huge hole was dug out with a backhoe...the hole is about 7'x10' and at least 6 feet deep! The idea is to have the top of the shelter where the door hinge is right at the level of the garage slab or just above (so water/dirt does not pour in the shelter).
The complete shelter was delivered a couple of days ago. A specialized truck came with a hoist on a track that was made to lift the pieces and place them. The storm shelter was pre-formed with some threaded metal inserts placed in the concrete.
The truck backed up to the pieces and chains/bolts attached to the holes in the top shelter piece. Then the top was lifted off the bottom.
Then the bottom, which has steel loops molded into the bottom, was hoisted up with chains and hooks onto the truck.
Now the truck moves both pieces into place (hey there's a huge truck backed into our garage already!)
Now the truck reverses the process, lowering the bottom into the pit. The guys were really good about lowering it gently, riding the base down into the pit. Then they measured it relative to the height of the garage floor, leveled it and rotated it to be square in the corner.
Finally they used a pneumatic caulking gun and several tubes of sealant to put caulk all over the edge of the bottom shelter piece. Then they lowered the top onto the bottom for the final time, bolted the top to the bottom using the threaded pre-molded bolt holes, cleaned up the excess caulk, and bolted the ladder to the wall and floor inside the bottom!
With that I went back to work. The next step was to fill the rest of the hole in with dirt. Supposedly the plumber will be here Friday. Pics of that if he's there!
1 comment:
(Angel said...) I'm hoping that putting in the storm shelter will be like getting super-prepared for winter in August, and buying a bunch of show shoes and mittens... then the weather will inevitably end up unseasonably warm and we'll never have to use them... perhaps the storm shelter will scare any future tornados away!
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