Business View Caribbean - April 2016 25
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.”
