Venegas Construction

Business View Caribbean 5 tion around the building’s perimeter forming the ex- terior walls. “In the United States, you have specialty contractors that do just that. We employed it, our- selves,” Venegas says. “In 1993, we built the largest post-tensioned mat foundation in the Americas, here in Puerto Rico.” A mat foundation is a massive type of foundation used to provide load-bearing capacity in expansive, rocky, or hydro- collapsible soils. “Then later on, in 2004, we were among the first to acquire mobile recycling equipment. This allowed us to recycle construction waste resulting from building shell and pavement demolitions, and process this waste for re-use as base materials installed under new pave- ments and buildings. As a result, shortly after 2004, we gained market share in demolition and roadwork projects. This recycling, in addition to being consistent with our recent sustainability efforts, introduced dual savings as it reduced both the amount of waste dis- position and the amount of import aggregate.” Ven- egas continues. “In 2013, we built a superflat floor for a manufacturing facility, where we obtained an FF of 100 and an FL of 96,” he adds. Conventional methods of construction are not adequate to produce floor surfaces that are flat or level enough to support the operation of the sophisticated lift trucks in wire guided, defined traffic, narrow aisle, high-rack environ- ments. Specialized methods of construction, incorpo- rating strip pour construction techniques, are required to produce a superflat floor. “So there were several points in our history where an opportunity presented itself,” he concludes. “If we present a timeline on our 50-year trajectory, you see a pattern where every sev- eral years, there is a new innovation which leads to a new segment of either growth or experience. We’ve continuously evolved with time.”