Volume. 2 Issue. 1
• Johnson Carlier: Three Generations of Success • Phoenix's Westown Shopping City • Atomic-Powered Construction • The Business of Safety
Spring 2013 Serving Contracting Firms and the Arizona Community …Then & Now
• Grand Avenue’s Mystery Dome • Four-Lane Freedom in the Fifties • Set in Concrete: The J.W. Lattimore Company
Branco provides the highest quality and most advanced products available in the positioning industry today. Branco has the in-house expertise to assist you in the selection of the right technology and the right products to get the job done right the first time.
Topcon Machine Control Motor Graders
Construction Rotating Lasers
Dozers
Pipe Lasers
Excavators
Automatic 3D GPS+ Technology
Scrapers
Sales, Rental, Service
Pavers
Installation &Training
3DMC² Graders & Dozers
Rental Equipment
Ground Engaging Tools
Motor Graders
3D GPS Products
Grade Tractors
2D Machine Control
Skid Steers
Lasers & Receivers
Tungsten Carbide Custom Application for: Blades, Teeth, Wear Plates, Segments, & Routers Patterns to fit your needs.
Cutting Edges For: Dozers, Loaders, Scrapers, Motor Graders sAll O.E.M. Edges sCustom Blades (Made to order)
Shanks & Teeth sAll O.E.M. Replacement Teeth sRipper Box Assemblies sReplacement Tooth Adapters
Fabrication / Repair Backhoe and Excavator Buckets
Replacement Parts for Elevating Scrapers Flights, Chains, Sprockets, Rollers, & Grouser Bar. Dozer Undercarriage
www.brancomachinery.com For More Information Call: 480-892-5657 1205 N. McQueen Rd. Gilbert, Arizona 85233
COMING UP IN TUCSON…. AZBIZCON II, Southern Arizona’s Largest Construction Exposition! The Alliance of Construction Trades will sponsor Southern Arizona’s Largest Construction and Business Expo on May 15, 2013 at the Hotel Tucson from 2 to 6 pm. The hotel is located at 475 North Granada Avenue in Tucson. AZBIZCON II, now in its sixth year, will feature heavy equipment including trucks, vans, cranes, forklifts displayed outside. In the conference hall, there will be over 100 exhibitors showcasing material suppliers, bidding technology, lien & bonding companies, banking organizations,
marketing strategists, and telecommunication equipment. Jim Kuliesh, President and CEO of ACT, said AZBIZCON II is open to all construction firms as well as commercial business owners and developers seeking to locate specialty contractors, business services, or material and equipment suppliers. For exhibitor or attendee information, see www.azbizcon.com or www.actaz.net or contact ACT at 520-624-3002 or subs@actaz.net.
…More details on page 35
Publisher William Horner Billy@arizcc.com Editor Douglas Towne Douglas@arizcc.com Marketing & Sales Consultant Chuck Runbeck Chuck@arizcc.com Advertising Manager Shane Addington Shane@arizcc.com Production Manager Laura Harley Laura@arizcc.com Columnist Paul Beaulieu John Bueker Contributing Writers Connor Descheemaker Roberta Graham
Advertising 623-826-8598
View our online magazine at: www.arizcc.com
• Suggestions? • Thoughts? • Corrections?
We Want To Hear From You! Contact the editor at Douglas@arizcc.com
Printed at Lithotech
Arizona Contractor & Community (ACC) magazine is published quarterly (spring, summer, fall, & winter). ACC is a professional publication designed for the contracting industry, engineers, architects, and others interested in Arizona and its history. Content including text, photographs or illustrations may not be reproduced without the written permission from the publisher. The publisher does not assume responsibility for unsolicited submissions. ACC reserves the right to reject any editorial and advertising material and assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. Arizona Contractor & Community Copyright © 2013
Volume. 2 Issue. 1 Spring 2013
CONTENTS
8. 10. 13. 22. 24. 28. 32. 34. 36. 42.
Editor’s Column: A Really Big Bang: Construction Using Nuclear Explosives - Douglas Towne Construction Around Arizona - William Horner Contract Awards - Provided by Bidjudge Architect’s Column: Grand Aspirations: Building Iglesia La Luz del Mundo - Roberta L. Graham Four-Lane Freedom: Arizona Enters the Interstate Age - Douglas Towne Westown Shopping City and the Emergence of the Phoenix Strip Mall - John Bueker Construction Column: The Business of Safety - Paul Beaulieu Vanishing Phoenix: Save Our School…Buildings! - Connor Descheemaker Johnson Carlier: Building Arizona for Ten Decades - Douglas Towne Digging Through the Archives: John W. Lattimore Company - William Horner
45.
Construction Marketplace
Front Cover - C.O. Johnson & Son The grand opening of Park 5th Avenue Building/Retail Shops, Scottsdale Arizona on April 24, 1963. In the center of the photograph is builder L. A. Johnson and to his right is architect, Joe Wong. See respective stories on pages 36 and 44.
Public Auction held the 2nd Saturday of every month. Preview Every Monday – Friday 8am – 4pm. Consignments Welcome. Western Sales Management, Inc
623-936-3300
1616 S 67th Ave.
Wsmauctioneers.com
Phoenix, AZ 85043
Wsmauctionbiz@yahoo.com
Editor’s Column Douglas Towne
A Really Big Bang: Construction Using Nuclear Explosives
S
projects? It certainly wasn’t through lack of trying by the U.S. government. After World War II, the U.S. conducted nuclear testing at the remote South Pacific atolls of Bikini and Eniwetok. The logistics proved difficult however, and an area for nuclear experiments was sought within the continental U.S. The Nevada Test Site, selected for its relatively isolated location within the Nellis Air Force Gunnery and Bombing Range, was created in January 1951. The first nuclear explosion at the site occurred later that month when a 0.5-kiloton bomb dropped from a B-50 Superfortress bomber was detonated aboveground over Frenchman Flat. Influenced by Cold War concerns, other nuclear tests quickly followed. Between 1951 and 1992, 928 tests were conducted at the Nevada Test Site, now known as the Nevada National Security Site. One
hundred of the blasts were atmospheric, 828 were detonated underground. Nuclear devices were dropped from planes, suspended from balloons or towers, and even fired from an artillery piece. After 1963, all testing at the site was executed underground in tunnels excavated into Pahute Mesa or boreholes drilled into Yucca Flat. All but 23 tests were conducted for military purposes. In 1955, President Eisenhower proposed Project Plowshare to study peaceful uses of nuclear explosions. Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb, envisioned grand schemes for Project Plowshare, describing the venture “to engage in the great art of what I want to call geographical engineering—to reshape the land to your pleasure…” A scientific genius, Teller was also the inspiration behind the title character in the 1964 black comedy
Images courtesy of author
ometimes less is more…at least when it comes to moving material for construction projects. I was reminded of this recently while standing on the lip of Sedan Crater: the world’s largest surface depression created by a nuclear blast in the U.S. The huge divot was created on June 6, 1962 by the detonation of a nuclear bomb buried 635 feet underground. The explosion instantaneously scattered over 10 million tons of sand and gravel at the Nevada Test Site, located an hour north of Las Vegas. That’s a lot of dump trucks full of alluvial material! Seeing the effects of the unfathomable power unleashed by this experiment is staggering. There is a reason why many who witnessed such nuclear tests compared it to “seeing God.” But with this potent source available to assist earthmoving endeavors, why are nuclear explosives not available for construction
Eight
film, Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. The second Project Plowshare test produced Sedan Crater, a crater that is a staggering 1,280 feet in diameter and 320 feet deep. This 104 kiloton test (in comparison, the Little Boy bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan during World War II was about 12.5 kilotons) was conducted to demonstrate the potential of nuclear earthmoving techniques. Possible applications included setting off a string of bombs across Central America to create a sea level canal linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Other potential civilian uses of nuclear detonations were to create harbors along rugged coastlines in Alaska, create a road cut through the mountains of Southern California, and to facilitate extraction of natural gas or valuable mineral resources. But none of these plans were ever carried out. The scientists and public officials involved in Project Plowshare envisioned it as a triumph of technology to help mankind. For some it may have been a moral mission to turn the nuclear bomb into something positive for civilization. But public safety and environmental impacts were never a major concern. Potential dangers were deemed vague and unproven; critics were “communist-inspired” or “environmental alarmists.” As a result, radioactive fallout from the nuclear detonations at the Nevada Test Site harmed countless people living downwind,
Opposite page: The 104-kiloton Sedan nuclear test detonated in 1962. Top left: Postcard from the Pioneer Club in Las Vegas shows mushroom cloud from atomic blast in the 1950s. Top right: Postcard from the Horseshoe Club in Las Vegas shows five sequential images of mushroom cloud from a 1950’s atomic test. Background: "Scorched, male mannequin in suit of dark fabric indicates a human would be burned but alive," is the caption from a photo illustrating an article on the effects of an atomic test in the May 16, 1955, issue of LIFE magazine.
especially in the nearby areas of Nevada, Utah and Arizona. Of all the nuclear tests, Sedan contaminated the most U.S. residents with two radioactive plumes dispersed to the east with nuclear fallout being particularly heavy in Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Illinois. Environmental problems are also astounding: an estimated 1.6 trillion gallons of groundwater is polluted at the site, as much water as Nevada is allowed to withdraw from the Colorado River over 16 years. At today’s prices, if not fouled, that groundwater would be worth $48 billion. Unable to solve these health and environmental problems, and with the practical benefits of expensive nuclear detonations proving to be nonexistent, Project Plowshare was terminated in 1975. This is why conventional explosives and earthmoving equipment are used in construction today. Sometimes less is more….
Image courtesy of Think Communications
Construction Around Arizona
Construction Around Arizona Freeways • Roadways Commercial • Residential William Horner Above: Sky Train construction progress at Sky Harbor with the McCarthy-Kiewit JV team (see story on page 16). Right: Chuck Jacobs, a 14-year-veteran of Sunstate Equipment works on the Larry Miller Hyundai project.
Ten