The largest concrete pour in the UAE – 22,000m3 – has been successfully completed by concrete supplier Unibeton Ready Mix.
The milestone concrete pour, which was the equivalent of filling nine Olympic-sized swimming pools, laid the basement of Al Attar Sky Spiral, a 49-storey residential tower in Al Sufouh, Dubai.
The 35-hour pour finished on Saturday 7 September, 2007 and leveraged the combined efforts of Unibeton’s nine, strategically located concrete batching plants – with a nominal capacity to generate up to 1,000m3 of concrete per hour – more than 150 transit mixers, 15 mobile and six standby pumps.
Unibeton, the largest concrete supplier in the country with annual supply exceeding 3 million m3, is a member of Al Fara’a Group.
The project contractor for the development is Arab Contractors and the consultant is Gulf Engineering & Consultancy.
The project offered many technical challenges, according to Mohammed Shedadeh, general manager, Unibeton, including maintaining the continuous supply of temperature-controlled concrete.
“With ambient temperatures currently around 40ºC, we had to maintain the concrete at the specified 32ºC with the use of over 1,500 tonnes of ice, coupled with stringent quality checks on 10,000 tonnes of cement and 40,000 tonnes of aggregate that were carried in 2,500 trucks,” he said.