Donley’s Concrete Group is excited to be receiving the Carolinas Chapter ABC Eagle Award (Excellence in Construction) for Duke Cameron Parking Deck.  The project won in the category for concrete projects over $10M. The Excellence in Construction Awards celebration honors Carolinas members’ most innovative and high-quality construction projects, and safety programs. 

The Duke Cameron parking garage, designed by Walker Parking, the engineer of record, created a very challenging 2,000 car structural concrete parking structure. The 775,000 sq. Ft. structure was completed in 12 months. The aggressive schedule proved challenging with the design requiring very strenuous specification requirements, calling for very specific quality control measures start to finish to produce the desired finished product for Duke University. A separate QA/QC person was hired to be at the site full time to test every truck for the deck pours at the end of the pump, correct and timely installation of reinforcement and post-tensioned cables and double check the reinforcing subcontractor’s daily installations.

The 12-month schedule was challenging, but Donley’s Concrete Group’s daily planning
and first run study reviews became the key to the safety, scheduling and success of this project. Through use of maturity meter testing for in place concrete strength and visual planning tools for daily tasks, the team was able to use their valuable time in the most productive way possible.

Another obvious challenge of the project was working on this massive structure within a fully operating campus. The overall logistics of the site, schedules, deliveries and safety became paramount with construction being close to students and faculty. The solution to working on a fully operating campus was to implement night concrete pours. A large majority of the concrete that was placed on the parking decks was placed at night, with concrete pours between 500 to 600 cubic yards per placement and taking 8 hours to place.

With the many challenges faced in the beginning, Donley’s utilized scheduling tools to manage the team and complete construction. Which in the end, helped Donley’s team finished the job three weeks ahead of schedule.